The Faster Labor Contracts Act is built on a false claim about decertifications. Our new research report shows why it falls apart. Read it here.
The U.S. House recently passed the Faster Labor Contracts Act by a vote of 230 to 193 and sent it to the Senate. Make no mistake, this legislation is being pushed by Big Labor, first and foremost Teamsters President Sean O'Brien, who co-authored a pro-labor framework with Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO). The House bill was introduced by Rep. Donald Norcross (D-NJ).
Employers should know that the FLCA, if passed by the Senate and signed by President Trump, could fundamentally change how first contracts are negotiated, and the results won't be good for employers or workers.
The FLCA's Decertification Myth
The bill aims to drastically amend the NLRA by putting strict time limits on first-contract bargaining. After a union wins an election, the employer must begin negotiating within 10 days. If no agreement is reached in 90 days, a federal mediator takes over, and if that fails 30 days later, a government-appointed arbitration panel establishes a binding two-year contract.
No ratification vote will be held, so workers will have no voice on the contract’s terms.
The arbitration panel can set wages, benefits, and other terms that the parties didn’t agree to, and both sides will be stuck with those details for two years regardless of industry, employer size, or contract complexity. Employers who bargain in good faith could still end up with a bad deal simply because the clock hit 90 days.
Meanwhile, it's no secret that the average time to reach a first union contract sits at 465 days, which shouldn't be too surprising since these are intricate agreements, and union representatives aren't known for being the most mild-mannered, logical bunch. Talks get heated. That's the nature of the game.
However, FLCA proponents argue that employers are the ones who are dragging out these talks to frustrate workers into filing decertification petitions and voting unions out.
As our analysis of the data shows, that's simply not the case.
What The Data Reveals
With heavy lifting from our LRIrightnow databases, we analyzed all 124 decertification elections held in 2025 and linked them to federal contract records from the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service and a decade of NLRB election data. [Read the full report here.]
Here’s the question we set out to answer: are decertification petitions coming from stalled first-contract talks, or somewhere else?
The data points toward somewhere else. Overwhelmingly, decertifications are happening at workplaces that already have a union contract. For 55.6 percent of the 2025 elections, we confirmed that collective bargaining agreements existed. Accounting for cases with older contracts that predate available records, roughly 84 percent of decertifications occurred where a contract had been in place.
Those workers ended their representation after experiencing union membership firsthand, not because a first contract never materialized.
