The bill shows that policymakers are increasingly aware that stronger organizing rights would help workers deal with mounting affordability challenges and build wealth for their families, but far larger changes are needed to fix America’s broken labor law. Nearly half of all workers say they would like to join a union and bargain collectively. Policymakers should not be content with tweaks to a fundamentally flawed labor system; they must build on the momentum achieved by the FLCA’s passage in the House to pass more comprehensive labor law reform, such as the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act—something most of the FLCA’s Republican supporters in the House and Senate and one House Democrat who voted for the FLCA have yet to co-sponsor.
What does the Faster Labor Contracts Act do?
The FLCA attempts to fix a real problem. Workers must overcome enormous obstacles to form new unions because the law gives corporations a range of legal options for busting unions and does not effectively stop them from resorting to illegal means. If workers organize and vote to form a union, employers often slow roll the negotiations over a first contract to delay paying union wages or even bust the union. Under current law, employers must bargain in “good faith,” but if they fail to do so, the remedy is to remind them of the need to bargain in good faith.
As a result, workers often wait and wait: A 2022 analysis conducted by Bloomberg Law found that it took an average of 465 days for employers and new unions to ratify their first contracts, and a 2009 study even found that about 1 in 3 unions have no contract after three years of negotiations. Workers in Buffalo, New York, voted to form the first union at a Starbucks location in December 2021, and negotiations are still ongoing—more than 600 days after the company and Starbucks Workers United announced they had reached a “path forward” for achieving collective bargaining agreements. Meanwhile, the National Labor Relations Board recently ordered Amazon to begin negotiations with workers at a Staten Island warehouse who won their union election in 2022, and Trader Joe’s workers still have no contract at any of the four locations that unionized beginning in 2022.
The FLCA promises to solve this problem by requiring arbitration for first-contract negotiations if a deal cannot be reached. It would require negotiations to begin within 10 days of a request from a worker or a newly formed labor union while requiring both sides to make “every reasonable effort” to sign a collective bargaining agreement. If an agreement is not reached within 90 days—or longer if both parties agree to further negotiations—it goes to arbitration with the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service (FMCS). The arbitrators will try to reach a settlement and, if that fails, issue a two-year binding decision to solve the dispute. At most, unions and businesses that cannot agree to a contract will go into binding arbitration within just 120 days.
Canada’s experience with first-contract arbitration shows how the FLCA may work in the United States
This solution to drawn-out negotiations and declining union density has been employed before in some Canadian provinces, and research on these laws suggests that it could lead to a small increase in private sector union density in the United States. Canada has a very similar workplace-by-workplace organizing system to the United States, though it allows regional governments more room for experimentation. As of 2012, seven of Canada’s 10 provinces had passed laws that implemented first-contract arbitration, and one study estimated that these laws, on average, increased union density in these provinces by 2 percentage points.
The Canadian experience provides a starting point for estimating how first-contract arbitration would affect American workers—though it may be optimistic given Canada’s union density of 30 percent, compared with just 10 percent overall in the United States, along with other favorable features in its labor law. If such a 2 percentage point increase in union density occurred for private sector workers in the United States, it would bring the benefits of union membership to 2.5 million workers, based on 2025 union membership rates. This would be a significant win for the workers who would be able to join unions and achieve contracts but not a fundamental alteration in the balance of power tilted in favor of corporations and a far cry from the major reforms in federal labor law that workers really need. An increase in private sector union density from 5.9 percent to 7.9 percent would bring us back to the levels of union membership American workers reached in 2004; by comparison, union density peaked at 34.2 percent in 1945.
Other research has found that first-contract arbitration helped more Canadian workers sign first contracts. One study found that these laws reduced work stoppages on first-contract negotiations in the private sector by at least 50 percent. In Ontario, another researcher estimated that the proportion of negotiations that successfully reached a first contract increased up to 14 percentage points with automatic first-contract arbitration versus nonautomatic arbitration.
Pro-worker policymakers should go beyond the FLCA
The FLCA would only achieve a modest result in the United States because it leaves most of the other loopholes in federal labor law open. It does not impose penalties for violating federal labor law, even though corporations break the law in 41.5 percent of all union election campaigns. It does not eliminate legal means of union busting, such as captive audience meetings—practices that fuel a $1.7 billion union avoidance industry. It does not prevent businesses from using tax breaks to pay for union busting or fix any of the other flaws addressed in more comprehensive reform bills, such as the PRO Act, which the House of Representatives passed in 2021. Nor does it incorporate other successful strategies to promote unions and collective bargaining, such as sectoral bargaining.
Even achieving these modest results depends on enforcement of the bill’s provisions, but given the Trump administration’s attacks on the agencies that enforce federal labor law, it is not clear whether this would happen. The bill would require arbitration to go through the FMCS, but Trump laid off most of the agency’s employees and requested only enough money in his budget to shut down the agency altogether. At the same time, attacks on the National Labor Relations Board, which oversees private sector union elections, are making it harder for workers to even form their first union.
What the bill does achieve is a signal for workers that policymakers can pass improvements to federal labor law, even if many of its congressional Republican supporters have not indicated support for other, more major pro-worker reforms—especially the PRO Act. The FLCA’s bipartisan supporters moved it to a vote on the House floor through a discharge petition, which allowed lawmakers to circumvent house leadership through a simple majority vote, and 20 Republicans joined with all voting House Democrats to pass the measure. Yet the FLCA’s path forward is unclear, as it must still advance through the Senate and be signed into law by President Donald Trump. The PRO Act, with only two Republican sponsors in the House and none in the Senate, is even less likely to be enacted in the near term.