Hawley’s bill speeds up union elections by removing guardrails

Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) thinks workers are having too hard of a time forming unions. His solution to that is to fast-track the process by removing the guardrails that prevent workers from being railroaded into a union.

Hawley has introduced legislation called the “Faster Labor Contracts Act.” It is intended to ensure that workers who have decided to collectively bargain can get a contract with management in place quickly. It does this by setting a strict 100-day time limit from when the workers vote to organize to when a contract is completed – 10 days to start negotiations and 90 days to finish them.

If a contract isn’t reached by then, either party can request federal mediators step in. If the mediators cannot get both parties to agree to a contract in 30 days, then a three-person arbitration panel can impose a binding two-year contract on both sides.

“Despite exercising their legal—and moral—right to bargain collectively, workers are often prevented from enjoying the benefits of the union they voted to form when mega-corporations drag their feet,” Hawley told Axios.

The legislation has one other republican co-sponsor, Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-OH), and three democrats, Sens. Cory Booker (D-NJ), Gary Peters (D-MI), and Jeff Merkley (D-OR). It has been endorsed by the International Brotherhood of Teamsters.

There’s a major problem with this framework: What if the election is disputed? There can be honest disagreements over which workers are eligible to vote and whether the elections were conducted fairly. Both sides have been known to engage in shenanigans. The Faster Labor Contracts Act would allow unions to contest defeats since the clock starts ticking when they make the request to management to sit down for negotiations. Management, by contrast, would have as few as ten days to even register a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), the federal agency that oversees the elections, before they would have to accept the election results and begin negotiations. Management would have no guarantee that the NLRB would address their complaint in time.

Hawley would likely argue that addressing management’s complaints isn’t the priority here. It’s sticking up for the workers. The problem is that, at this stage, it still isn’t clear that a union properly represents the workers. Allowing management to raise concerns about the election is the only practical way to get the NLRB to probe whether a union’s claim to be the workers’ representative is legit. No other entity involved in the election can raise a concern at this point.

The upshot is that Hawley’s legislation is a recipe for potentially railroading workers into unions that a majority of them didn’t vote for.

There’s also a significant practical problem with Hawley’s proposal. It relies on the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service (FMCS), another independent federal agency, to handle the mediations. The agency would therefore have to ramp up its operations if Hawley’s legislation was enacted. However, the FMCS was also included in a White House executive order requiring federal agencies to “reduce the performance of their statutory functions and associated personnel to the minimum presence and function required by law.”

It is not clear if the FMCS would have the personnel needed to deal with the additional requirements added by Hawley’s legislation. Nor is it clear what would happen to the deadlines the legislation would impose if the agency was overburdened. The ironic result could be that Hawley’s bill would swap out delays from management with delays from the government.

The best thing that can be said about Hawley’s legislation is that he appears to have left a few other bad ideas he previously proposed on the cutting room floor. Or maybe he’s just saving them for later.