A bipartisan group of senators introduced the Faster Labor Contracts Act on March 4, 2025. The proposed legislation would amend the National Labor Relations Act (“NLRA”) to require employers to begin negotiating a collective bargaining agreement with a union within 10 days of the union’s request to bargain following the National Labor Relations Board’s (“NLRB”) certification of the union as the representative of the employer’s employees. It would further require the union and employer to agree to a collective bargaining agreement within 90 days of beginning bargaining, and in the absence of agreement either side would have the right to request mediation. If mediation fails within 30 days, the dispute would then be referred for binding arbitration to secure an initial collective bargaining agreement. It is certain that if this amendment to the NLRA becomes law, employers, and their employees whom unions purport to represent, would be affected.

This represents a drastic change to the NLRA’s framework that has been in place since the NLRA was first signed into law in 1935. While the NLRA requires employers and unions to bargain in good faith with one another, it does not require either party to agree to any particular proposal or to otherwise make a concession. 29 U.S.C. § 158(d). If this proposed legislation becomes law, parties would be forced, through binding arbitration, to contract proposals they would not have been obligated to accept under current law.

Moreover, under the existing framework, both the union and employer have the right to challenge the results of a representation election. While it is not entirely clear what the ramifications of this amendment would be, the proposed language seems to suggest that employers would lose their ability to have an Article III court review the NLRB’s certification of a union as the collective bargaining representative of its employees. Effectively, this would mean that employers likely would no longer be able to challenge unfair actions by unions during the course of union representation elections. 

The effects of this legislation would be significant. It eliminates the concept of “voluntary agreement,” which is a fundamental principle of United States labor law. Under that principle, only the parties to a collective bargaining agreement should determine the terms of the agreement. But the proposed legislation takes that control out of the hands of the parties and turns it over to the federal government. The mediators and arbitrators who would determine the contours of imposed collective bargaining agreements would not have the benefit of institutional knowledge and experience, but would still be determining the terms and conditions of employment for employees whose workplaces they do not fully understand. 

This proposed legislation is clearly designed to benefit unions, at the expense of both employers and the employees the same unions are theoretically supposed to represent. Given this dynamic, it is noteworthy that two Republican senators have co-sponsored the legislation. If passed into law, we expect a variety of legal challenges to arise, including potentially to the constitutionality of a mandatory interest arbitration requirement that would essentially result in government-imposed contract terms on private parties. Stay tuned.