A Republican plan to resurrect Obama’s assault on labor union democracy

Since Congressional Republicans rose from the Emerging Democratic Majority-declared dead to take the House of Representatives majority in 2010, they have had one goal: stop the agenda of now-former President Barack Obama. On issues ranging from health care to government spending to energy policy, Congressional Republicans stood athwart “hope and change” yelling “Stop,” with varying degrees of success.

One of their more successful yells came on labor-relations policy, where they defeated the cynically misnamed Employee Free Choice Act with support from moderate Senate Democrats who upheld a filibuster against the “card check bill.” But now some Congressional Republicans want to put a knife in the back of a major victory for President Donald Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency to reverse one of former President Obama’s most stinging defeats. What gives?

The legislation

The “Faster Labor Contracts Act” would require workers and employers to accept a government-dictated contract (including, in the 24 states that allow them, a forced-dues clause) if a newly formed union could not mutually agree a contract with the employer in fewer than 100 days. In practice, this almost never happens, because the total restructuring of a non-union workplace into a unionized workplace is difficult.

As of this writing, House Democrats are circulating a “discharge petition” to force a floor vote on this gift to Big Labor bosses. This is not an entirely performative threat. The measure has 17 Republican co-sponsors in a House that has just a five-vote GOP majority and a looming Congressional mid-term where Democrats are expected to win control.

To call the bill highly controversial is an understatement. Indeed, in testimony before the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP), a union-selected witness, who worked as a union shop steward at a Boeing plant, conceded under questioning from Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA) that government-mandated contract cram-downs would amount to “removing democracy from the workplace” which undermined “the whole point of the union,” namely that workplace democracy.

But union bosses love so-called “mandatory arbitration,” and have wanted it for almost long enough to legally drink. There are two major benefits to cram-down contracts for union bosses. The first is inertia: if a contract is imposed, then the muscle memory of the pre-union workplace is lost and the union rules become the default. The second is far more cynical: under National Labor Relations Board precedent, once a contract is agreed (or presumably under this legislation, imposed by government regulators) the union cannot be removed for three years. Glenn Taubman of the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation explains:

Under [the contract-bar rule], employees are forbidden from decertifying their incumbent union representative for as long as three years, simply because the union and employer have reached a collective bargaining agreement. The text of the NLRA is silent about such a bar limiting employees’ rights. Indeed, the only “bar” Congress established in the NLRA is a one-year “election bar” (no more than one valid election can be held per year), which is a far cry from the Board-created three-year contract bar that disenfranchises employees and locks them in to union representation and possibly into the forced payment of dues as an employment condition,) regardless of their representational preferences.

Under current law, the only bar against removal (“decertification” in the language of labor lawyers) that a newly certified union enjoys is the one-year “election bar.” And if the union cannot deliver on its campaign promises within that period, workers frequently elect to attempt to remove the union on the entirely understandable grounds (well, understandable unless you’re a union boss or a progressive activist who wants conscripted foot soldiers they/them can use to advance Everything Leftism) that the union failed to timely deliver on its campaign promises. Union bosses, especially those employing conscripted workers as foot soldiers for Everything Leftism, would love to see that potential impediment to their power removed.

Undoing DOGE

Republican activists love the work that the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency did or at least tried to do in the first year of President Trump’s second term. And one of its biggest wins was shutting down a labor-relations agency that had turned into little more than a vanity project for its taxpayer-funded employees, the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service (FMCS).

Daily Wire journalist Luke Rosiak first exposed the FMCS’s ridiculous spending a decade ago. As he wrote:

FMCS seemed, quite clearly, to exist for the benefit of those on its payroll, and not much else. One employee told me: “Let me give you the honest truth: A lot of FMCS employees don’t do a hell of a lot, including myself. Personally, the reason that I’ve stayed is that I just don’t feel like working that hard, plus the location on K Street is great, plus we all have these oversized offices with windows, plus management doesn’t seem to care if we stay out at lunch a long time. Can you blame me?”

With a long-overdue crackdown on government agency mismanagement on the agenda and ample evidence of such mismanagement at FMCS, the Trump administration ordered the FMCS closed. Litigation, including litigation led by the Trump administration’s adversaries at the AFL-CIO, to block the closure is ongoing.

But merely keeping the FMCS staff on the taxpayer payroll is not enough for the sponsors, including the Republican sponsors, of the Faster Labor Contracts Act. No, their legislation would give the FMCS the power and the obligation to dictate contracts in private businesses across the country. It’s a massive expansion of power of an agency that has shown no competence to use it that was deservedly targeted by President Donald Trump and his DOGE team. And the only beneficiaries would be union bosses.

The regions of the Stupid Party

Republicans and organized labor have a messy history, alternating between the Taft-Hartley principles of restraining union power and soliciting the favor of union bosses in the hope of breaking the century-plus alliance between Big Labor and the organized left. In the House of Representatives, that messy history manifests in wild regional differences in the approaches to Big Labor among House Republicans.

Typically, House Republicans from the Republican Party’s base territories in the South, the Great Plains, and the Mountain West (not coincidentally the regions that are disproportionately right-to-work states) support the Taft-Hartley principles. See for evidence the cosponsors list of the National Right to Work Act, proposed legislation to eliminate forced union fees nationwide.

But they are not enough to make a majority, and their numbers require reinforcements from regions that are staunchly pro-union, and where Republicans fear crossing a powerful special-interest group: the Northeast (especially New York state, New Jersey, and inner-suburban Pennsylvania), the Pacific West, and Ohio, where the state Republican Party’s apparent dominance hides the fact that Big Labor is influential in determining the party and state’s leadership. And those regional dynamics explain 12 of the 17 Republicans who have signed on to the Faster Labor Contracts Act. (The remainder appear to be a mix of ideological moderates, swing-district Representatives afraid of losing re-election, and sympathizers with the American Compass tendency to “Make the AFL-CIO Great Again,” though none of these categories are necessarily exclusive.)

Now, those 17 signatures aren’t necessarily evidence that the representatives actually plan to help the bill become law. (I am going to speak hard truths about how Congress actually works, Schoolhouse Rock children.) A member of the majority party can sign on as a sponsor of a minority-party-backed bill reasonably confident that the leadership of the majority party will prevent it from ever getting a vote, even if a majority of the House sign on as co-sponsors, unless it has overwhelming support. It’s a cheap way to curry favor with special-interest groups, and organized labor is sometimes just another special-interest group.

That’s where the “discharge petition” comes in. Using a discharge petition, any Representative (typically a member of the minority party) can force a vote on any legislation if a majority of the House of Representatives sign the petition. Members of the majority party usually do not sign discharge petitions, because it is seen as a rebellion against party leadership (compare with the “vote of no confidence” in a parliamentary system). But whenever a piece of legislation has enough theoretical support to gain a majority (and 17 Republicans plus all 212 Democrats makes a comfortable majority) the threat that a discharge petition could pass cannot be discounted.

Senators and math

So, the discharge petition to mandate cram-down union contracts might die in the House on partisan-loyalty grounds. But the Senate, even a Senate in Republican control, is not a sure grave for this Obama policy either.

In the Senate, there are two (functionally indistinguishable) factions of Republicans serving liberal special interests and engaged in earning the GOP’s derisive “Stupid Party” moniker. First is the faction that is extremely receptive toward Teamsters Union boss Sean O’Brien, led by the Senate Republican lead on the Faster Labor Contracts Act, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO). Sen. Hawley may be trying to court O’Brien, but O’Brien is likely playing him like a fiddle.

As I noted when Hawley first raised Obamanomics from the dead:

Sen. Hawley received the paltry sum of $5,000 for his re-election campaign from the Teamsters Union, less than the $25,000 the union gave to the hybrid PAC of California Governor Gavin Newsom (D), who was not even up for re-election in 2024. All included, OpenSecrets assesses that the total organizational and employee contributions to House and Senate candidates from the Teamsters Union in the 2024 election cycle broke 92 percent for Democrats (actually more like 93 percent, since independent candidates who received contributions were former Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ), whom OpenSecrets classified as an independent candidate; Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), who caucuses with Senate Democrats; and Nebraska candidate Dan Osborn, a nominal independent who was supported by Senate Democrats’ official Super PAC) and 7 percent for Republicans. This consummated what the social-democratic (that’s a fancy European term for “socialist”) magazine Compact characterized as a “pathbreaking alliance” between the Missouri senator and Big Labor.

Hawley is joined on the bill by two more junior Republicans who are aligned with the Hewlett Foundation-funded divide-the-right-and-rule-it think tank American Compass, Roger Marshall of Kansas and Bernie Moreno of Ohio (that state again). Add all Democrats to the three Republicans who have gone along with this and that makes 50 already, even without the two moderate Republicans (Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska). The math, even with the 60-vote threshold, could rapidly get ugly—and since Sen. Hawley and Sen. Marshall sit on the Senate’s labor committee, a discharge-petition-like stunt to force the bill to the floor is dangerously live.

Bad policy makes for public embarrassment

As of 2025, only 5.9 percent of private-sector workers are union members. And a large number of them do not support the agenda of their union bosses. And as I established above, it is union bosses, not workers or even union workers, who profit from federally crammed-down contracts. In the 2024 election, 47 percent of union household members—union members and their families, including those associated with extremely left-wing government worker unions like the Chicago Teachers Union—did not vote for the AFL-CIO’s candidate, Kamala Harris.

But all too often, seeking the blandishments of the cocktail party circuit in D.C. and the favor of liberal special interest groups, the Stupid Party goes chasing union bosses. As I noted in my eulogy for the career of ex-Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-Deremer:

Every time a GOP administration has placed a pro-union individual in the Labor Secretary job to curry favor with organized labor since the 1950s, the result has been a failed tenure. Every time the GOP has put itself in service of the Teamsters Union, the result has been embarrassment for the party. Let history be a warning.

It is a sin as old as post-New Deal two-party politics, dating to when the ink on the Taft-Hartley Act was barely dry. In 1953, a former GOP Senator wrote:

Unfortunately, many leaders in that group, who now occupy influential positions in the Administration, are convinced that to survive politically the G.O.P. must “buy” the support of big union leaders by yielding to their demands. This despite the evidence of recent elections, which show that no leader can deliver the so-called “labor vote” and that Republicans have been supported by rank-and-file workers when they disregarded demands of union leaders and supported measures aimed at protecting and expanding individual worker rights.

That former Senator, Joseph Ball of Minnesota, was able to see his party come to its senses and the Taft-Hartley Act preserved mostly intact. One hopes that the Republicans of today will come to their senses and leave in the dustbin of history an agency that DOGE rightly shuttered and Obamanomics policies that even the Democrats of Obama’s day rightly laid aside.

Source: https://capitalresearch.org/article/a-republican-plan-to-resurrect-obamas-assault-on-labor-union-democracy/