How a Pro-Worker Bill May Advance in the House

As my colleague Bob Kuttner has been documenting of late, the congressional Republicans’ lockstep support for every Trumpian outrage and whim is beginning to fray. Yesterday, the 211 House Democrats were joined by four Republicans to pass a resolution directing President Trump either to withdraw the armed forces attacking Iran or win congressional approval to continue waging the war. That the Republican-controlled Senate will go along with this is not exactly what the smart money is telling us, and even if it did, there’s no chance that this or a kindred resolution would have anywhere near the two-thirds support required to override a Trump veto.

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But the House action comes on the heels of other Republican pushbacks to our l’état c’est moi president. Senate Republicans’ refusal to bring up the appropriations bill for ICE and the Border Patrol until Trump scraps his proposed $1.8 billion slush fund for his acolytes and goons has compelled Trump and his attorney general to say that proposal has been discarded. (Some Republicans, not to mention every Democrat, remain skeptical until it’s clear that a stake has been driven through the slush fund’s heart.) The other by-product of Trump’s suit against his government—the deal between Trump and his government exempting him, his family, and his businesses from any audits of their past tax filings—may yet pose one more stumbling block to Republicans all too aware that Trump’s self-dealing may drag way too many of them down in November’s midterms.

Now, another small band of House Republicans (seven, to be precise) have signed on with the 211 House Democrats to present the House with the required number of members (218) to take up yet another bill that Speaker Mike Johnson and the Republican leadership would have preferred to bury. In this instance, the bill that the discharge petition will bring to the floor, probably next week, isn’t a move against any Trump misdeed or even a specifically Trumpian policy. Rather, it chips away at one aspect of our deficient labor law that favors businesses over their workers.

The bill—the Faster Labor Contracts Act, authored by Rep. Donald Norcross (D-NJ) and co-sponsored by Rep. Pete Stauber (R-MN)—seeks to rectify one of the glaring deficiencies in the National Labor Relations Act, which imposes no limits on the time period between a company’s workers’ vote to unionize and reaching their first contract with their employer. According to a study by Bloomberg Law, the average time that elapses between the workers’ vote and their first contract is 458 days, and many employers, including some of America’s largest and richest companies, refuse to bargain with their workers at all. It was four years ago, for instance, that workers at Amazon’s massive Staten Island processing warehouse voted to go union, and Amazon has yet even to sit down with those workers to commence bargaining. The NLRA neither imposes a time limit on this process, nor provides any significant penalty for companies that delay bargaining or refuse to bargain altogether.

Norcross’s bill would amend the NLRA both to establish time limits and create a binding arbitration process should no agreement be reached between the workers and their bosses. Under its terms, an employer would be required to begin bargaining with a newly certified union within ten days of getting a written request. If no agreement emerges after 90 days of negotiations, either party can request federal mediation. If mediation fails after 30 days (or longer if both sides agree to an extension) to produce language agreeable to both sides, the process is referred to a three-member arbitration panel that will impose an initial, binding two-year contract, which can be amended only if both sides agree to the amendment.

(In a parallel breakthrough for workers, Massachusetts voters created a law in 2024 that enabled the drivers for Uber and Lyft—who, as independent contractors, are not covered by the NLRA—to form unions that can bargain with the companies. The law—whose terms have been replicated by a bill that just was passed by the Illinois legislature—contains time limits and binding arbitration requirements similar to those in Norcross’s bill.)

For more than half a century, Democrats have been trying to amend the NLRA so that it can vest workers with the power to form unions and win contracts that it originally had before Republican-controlled Congresses and courts began to weaken it in the late 1940s. Every time since then that Democrats have controlled both houses of Congress and the White House, they’ve passed such bills in the House, only to fail to surmount the 60-vote cloture hurdle in the Senate. But such bills haven’t gone anywhere in periods when even the House was run by Republicans. That Norcross’s bill is now likely to pass the House reflects subtle tectonic changes in the nation’s political and economic landscape. Even as every Republican elected official is aware that their party now commands reliably majority support from the white working class, just a handful seem to have realized that their culture-war bonds with that class could be supplemented by some policies addressing some of the working class’s economic plights. That handful includes the conservative analyst and strategist Oren Cass, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO), and now roughly 3 percent of House Republicans, whose sentiments on this particular issue only matter by aligning themselves with 100 percent of House Democrats.

It would be a stunning surprise if Hawley could find six other Republican senators who, by aligning with every Senate Democrat, could surmount the cloture hurdle to pass this legislation, which Trump would be certain to veto in any case. But even the occasional Republican lawmaker might realize that in a time when the rate of private-sector unionization is a bare 6 percent, while unions’ approval rating is ten times that, the occasional support for basic worker rights might not be a terrible idea. The real obstacle such legislation faces, of course, isn’t the Senate’s 60-vote hurdle, it’s the outrage from the ultra-entitled capitalists who on matters such as this own the Republicans and still lease the occasional Democrat.