The Faster Labor Contracts Act would force workers into unions they never voted for

Unions and their allies in Congress say that the Faster Labor Contracts Act is needed to prevent businesses from endlessly delaying workers’ efforts to secure representation. But the push has another motive: trying to get union contracts approved before workers change their minds.

That’s assuming they are even the same workers who voted for union representation. The legislation could easily create situations where workers who never voted for a union get stuck with one anyway. That may even be the intention behind the law.

The legislation would require management to sign a union contract no more than 100 days from when a majority of workers vote for representation. If a contract isn’t signed by then, the union can demand that the matter go to a government-appointed arbitrator who can impose a contract on both parties. A discharge petition to force a House vote on the legislation is underway.

Delays in reaching union contracts are not uncommon and they’re not a new issue either. A 2022 Bloomberg report found that in 53 percent of cases first contracts took more than a year. The median number of days was 374. The same report said that in 2009, a nearly identical 52 percent of cases also took more than a year.

While that’s not optimal, if a majority of workers are truly united in favor of a union, they will get one eventually. But what if they aren’t? A 2023 fact sheet by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), a pro-labor think tank, states that a major impetus for the Faster Labor Contracts Act is to ensure that contracts are reached before the workers who voted switch jobs and move on. Drawn-out negotiations, EPI said, can lead to high turnover that undermines union pushes.

“High turnover means the employer can recruit new workers who did not participate in the successful organizing campaign. In human terms, absent the shared experience that led to union recognition, the new workers may not identify as strongly with the new union,” EPI warned.

Businesses are hardly being devious by recruiting replacement workers who didn’t participate in the earlier vote. They literally have no choice. Only people who are employees at the time of a workplace vote are allowed to vote. Those are the rules enforced by the federal National Labor Relations Board (NLRB).

EPI’s fact sheet further cautioned, “In legal terms, the increased turnover may open up opportunities for employers to ask the NLRB to conduct a union decertification election by arguing that the union no longer represents the current workforce.”

In that situation, the NLRB should consider holding a new vote. While it would be legal for the earlier group’s vote to be binding on the new hires, it may not be fair because the new workers may have a different opinion. Federal law has long been stacked against workers who seek to decertify unions that don’t represent their interests.

Another notable aspect of the Faster Labor Contracts Act is that it is not written to address the worst delays. It sets a hard deadline for all negotiations.

Professions with historically high turnover rates, such as retail trade, leisure, and hospitality, – e.g., clerks, waiters and waitresses, hotel maids, etc. – typically face shorter delays in getting union contracts, though the average is still about a year. These are jobs that require fewer specialized skills and are less likely to be long-term careers. In the retail industry, the worker turnover rate is about 60 percent. In the hotel industry, the rate is estimated at 70-80 percent, and in the restaurant industry turnover exceeds 100 percent.  

The longest delays occur mostly in professions that have the lowest turnover. According to a 2021 Bloomberg report, the sectors that take the longest are health care, social assistance, information technology, financial services, and education. In those cases, the delays can last between 466-528 days. These are usually highly skilled jobs that require training and often certification. They’re not professions with relatively high turnover rates. Registered nurses, for example, have an 18 percent turnover rate. For tech employees, it is 8 percent. A delay for those workers in getting a contract, while perhaps annoying, is less likely to deter them.

The retail, leisure, and hospitality sectors, by contrast, are traditionally harder for unions to organize because the workers who would back a union are also less likely to stick around. That’s why the unions want contract deadlines to apply to all negotiations, not just cases in which companies may be deliberately delaying things. Unions might otherwise find themselves in a “herding cats” situation because workers are constantly coming and going.

The Faster Labor Contracts Act would, in short, increase the likelihood that workers who never voted for a union would get one anyway because their workplace was unionized before they arrived. Shouldn’t current workers have a say in whether they’re represented?