In June, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the Faster Labor Contracts Act. The act amends the existing National Labor Relations Act to require employers to start contract negotiations within ten days of recognizing a union. If the two sides cannot reach an agreement after 90 days, then the contract dispute goes to mediation. Should that also fail, a three-person board of arbiters is empowered to produce an initial and binding contract. 

With only a slim majority in the House, twenty Republicans defied their party’s Congressional leadership and backed Faster Labor Contracts. While the act is unlikely to make it through the Senate while it is still in GOP hands (or receive Trump’s signature even if it does), it represents a crack in the party’s decades-old antiunionism. That crack suggests an opening in the long-delayed project of labor law reform. 

Unions have anchored the Democratic Party for almost a century. In recent decades, the inability (and even reluctance) of Democrats in Congress to update labor legislation has created an opening for a bloc of Republicans to seize the initiative. 

Faster Labor Contracts is a signature objective of Missouri Senator Josh Hawley, a key figure in the self-styled “New Right.” Hawley is part of a constellation of politicians, think tanks and pundits who argue that the GOP needs to abandon its “free market” orthodoxy and build a “conservative labor movement.”

This emerging Republican tendency has peeled away some influential union leaders from the Democratic ranks. Chief among them is International Brotherhood of Teamsters president Sean O’Brien, who backed Trump’s reelection and continues to back Republican candidates across the country. O’Brien is also a major supporter of Faster Labor Contracts. 

According to Sunshine McBride, the Teamsters’ federal legislative director, labor law reform has its best chance in Congress if passed piece by piece through stand-alone bills such as Faster Labor Contracts. Specifically, that means “creating more opportunities for Republicans to start to take those actions depending on where they fell on a continuum of support for labor.” 

McBride’s logic appeared to play out this summer. Take Republican Representative Rob Bresnahan, who voted for Faster Labor Contracts. His northern Pennsylvania district covers the Rust Belt town of Scranton, and he has also locked up a number of union endorsements (including the Teamsters) for his reelection bid this fall. 

Faster Labor Contracts comes out of the much more expansive, Democrat-backed PRO Act, which also includes provisions to protect and advance workers’ right to organize and strike on the job. 

While Faster Labor Contracts certainly helps workers who have already cleared the immense hurdles to winning union recognition, it also leaves them bound to contract terms dictated by mediators and arbiters. Even if employers are forced to sign a contract, workers may also be forced to accept less than they demand. For the Republican Party’s big donors in employer and industry groups, that is certainly an attractive feature of the bill.  

On its own, Faster Labor Contracts underlines the limits of Republican-led labor reform. Should the Democrats win the House or the Senate in November, working people in California and across the country need to press for a more expansive program of genuinely pro-union policies. 

As Heidi Shierholz of the Economic Policy Institute recently noted, there is no single legislative “silver bullet” to rebuild the organized labor movement. Passing Faster Labor Contracts is an essential piece of that larger objective, but, as Shierholz also argues, it should be supplemented with a “mandatory cost-of-living adjustment (COLA) for workers whose first contract bargaining ends up in arbitration.” 

Unless Democrats prioritize policies that help workers win union recognition and protect their right to strike, for example, the Republican alternative will create new institutional choke points to rein in workers as they fight to win power on the job.