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When a fed-up bunch of baristas in Buffalo, New York, organized the first-ever Starbucks union in December of 2021, excitement rippled through the labor movement. Precarious fast-food workers around the country wondered if corporate goliaths like Starbucks and Chipotle, which employ hundreds of thousands of workers without a union contract, could be brought to the bargaining table.
Not so fast, they learned.
Although Starbucks Workers United’s numbers have grown to more than 12,000 workers at almost 700 locations across 45 states in the nearly five years since the 27 Starbucks workers at Buffalo’s Elmwood Avenue branch first unionized, not a single one of those shops has won a union contract.
Which, sad to say, is just normal American labor relations. Across the United States, employers with newly minted union shops currently stall for an average of 465 days to negotiate a first contract, according to a 2022 study of Bloomberg Law’s labor data. Data on time-to-contract is scarce, but labor historian Kate Bronfenbrenner’s 2009 study of roughly 1,000 NLRB elections between 1999 and 2003 revealed that 25 percent of organized units that had unionized had not won a contract more than three years after they’d voted to go union and the NLRB had certified their victory. Many more, we may assume, were never unionized at all.
Employers with newly minted union shops currently stall for an average of 465 days.
This year, a bipartisan group of legislators introduced the Faster Labor Contracts Act in both houses of Congress. The legislation aims to give newly unionized workers the legal means to enforce contract negotiations with their bosses, setting legally enforceable time limits for bargaining after a union’s first written request to negotiate and essentially guaranteeing a contract within 130 days or less.
But as workers wait to find out if they might ever get to stop waiting, intransigent corporations benefit from stalling, hoping to demoralize their workers and reduce their interest in and support for their union. In early 2025, Starbucks briefly entertained mediation before walking away from the bargaining table. By the end of that year, Starbucks Workers United baristas walked out of work and staged a nationwide strike at the majority of unionized Starbucks locations. But Starbucks outlasted the striking workers by relying on other, non-unionized locations and hiring scabs to cover for striking workers. Dejected and defeated, the baristas called off the strike and returned to work after nearly three months off the job and on the line.
“Every day there was a certain amount of anger and frustration, like ‘why can’t this end?’” said Rami Saied, 27, a former barista and current New York graduate student who participated in the Red Cup Rebellion. “There was, on some level, nothing we could do to get them to the negotiating table. They would not bend unless they were required to bend.”
The Faster Labor Contracts Act would require employers to bend. The act stipulates that the company must begin bargaining “not later than 10 days after receiving a written request” from the union. After that, if 90 days pass without the union and the employer reaching an agreement, either party would have the option of requesting mediation from the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service. If a month goes by and the parties still can’t reach an agreement even with mediation, a three-person arbitration panel—composed of one union pick, one employer pick, and one member agreed to by both—will “render” a contract with a two-year expiration date.
The legislation amends the National Labor Relations Act to provide some teeth to what was supposed to be the law. Section 8(d) of that act requires employers “to meet at reasonable times and confer in good faith with respect to wages, hours, and other terms and conditions of employment.” But “reasonable times” and “good faith” are vague and not very prescriptive. If an employer is found to have not met at reasonable times or bargained in good faith, they’re merely mandated to return to the bargaining table—not a punishment that a determinedly anti-union company would take seriously.
“The remedy is not really a remedy,” said labor lawyer and policy analyst Matt Bruenig, about the consequences for employers failing to bargain in good faith and reasonable time. “There’s no money. It’s not like they get penalized, fined. All that happens is they order you to bargain in good faith. Well, that’s what the law already says! Violating the law with respect to bargaining results in an order that you follow the law, after two to three years of going through this process.”
Even when employers are found to have violated the law and ordered to negotiate a contract, sometimes the delays alone can be enough to destroy a union. This April, the Chipotle union in Lansing, Michigan, dissolved after three years without securing a contract. In a restructuring last year prior to the Red Cup Rebellion strike, Starbucks shuttered 59 unionized locations. Without enforcement of the National Labor Relations Act, there’s little reason bosses should negotiate with their workers when they can just outlast them.
“It works because when you have 100 percent turnover—which you do in the retail world and fast food—all you have to do is wait a year and you get an entirely new workforce, who may or may not be in favor of the union,” said labor historian Nelson Lichtenstein. “Enthusiasm fades and people leave.”
With Amazon facing union battles of its own, the Faster Labor Contracts Act could play a pivotal role in reviving the country’s long-declining labor union membership rates by paving the way for Amazon employees to secure their first contract with the nation’s second-largest employer. After warehouse workers at Staten Island’s JFK8 facility formed Amazon Labor Union through a hard-fought 2022 union election, the company has refused to recognize the union or bargain during the subsequent four years, nitpicking one legal battle after another in National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) proceedings. The company has most recently held steadfast even in light of an NLRB order that it must bargain with workers at JFK8, throwing arguments at the wall to find if any of them sticks. The basis of Amazon’s current argument rides on the notion that when the Amazon Labor Union affiliated with the Teamsters union in 2024, it should have conducted another NLRB election.
“For years, the Teamsters have pushed a false narrative and continued to intentionally mislead the public, claiming to represent employees and Delivery Service Partners across our network,” Amazon spokesperson Sam Stephenson told the Prospect. “The truth is Amazon employees and the employees of Delivery Service Partners have never held an NLRB election to choose the Teamsters to be their representatives.”
The Teamsters have a different understanding of the law.
“Amazon exploits the NLRB process, then asks the courts to declare it unconstitutional. You can’t have it both ways,” said Matthew McQuaid, a spokesperson for the Teamsters, the union the Amazon Labor Union affiliated with in 2024. “We need the Faster Labor Contracts Act to ensure employers respect the rights of workers by meeting them at the table promptly and negotiating in good faith for a fair first contract.”
Speaking at the Teamsters convention this June, the act’s author, Republican Sen. Josh Hawley (MO), rallied the crowd with a litany of Amazon’s abuses, drawing attention to the “1,460 days of refusal to negotiate and counting.”
Hawley, who declined to be interviewed for this story, now must contend with his Republican colleagues if the bill stands any chance of passing. After House Speaker Mike Johnson declined to bring the bill to the floor of the House, the Faster Labor Contracts Act’s Democratic sponsor, Rep. Donald Norcross (NJ), filed a discharge petition and obtained the 218 required signatures—from every Democrat as well as seven Republicans—to force the vote. The bill passed in the House in June with the help of 20 Republican defectors, and is currently sitting in the Senate’s Health, Education, Labor and Pensions committee, where Hawley is the sixth-ranking majority member. He’s a leader of a nebulous pro-labor contingent of the Republican Party, spawned by conservative economist Oren Cass and his think tank American Compass. Cass contends that “America needs a conservative labor movement.”
Hawley, who has called himself “the most pro-labor Republican in the United States Senate,” has a rocky labor voting record. In 2018, as Missouri’s attorney general, Hawley supported the state’s “right to work” referendum (which voters rejected), before walking his support back in his 2024 Senate run. He voted no on the Butch Lewis Act, which saved the pensions of union workers, and declined to co-sponsor the far more robust PRO Act, of which the Faster Labor Contracts Act comprises a small part. Still, besides the Faster Labor Contracts Act, Hawley has recently championed labor legislation like the Higher Wages for American Workers Act, which would increase the national minimum wage to $15.
“I’ve been asked many times since I introduced [the act] … ‘what’s a conservative Republican like you, Josh, doing introducing labor legislation?’” Hawley said to the crowd of Teamsters at the convention. “And I say, you know, that’s an easy question with an easy answer. Listen, I’m for the free market, I’m for free enterprise, I’m for capitalism. But above all, I am for right and wrong.”
