How a Pro-Worker Bill May Advance in the House

Today on TAP: Seven Republicans have joined every House Democrat to bring pro-union legislation to the floor next week.

by Harold Meyerson
June 4, 2026

As my colleague Bob Kuttner has been documenting of late, the congressional Republicans’ lockstep support for every Trumpian outrage and whim is beginning to fray. Yesterday, the 211 House Democrats were joined by four Republicans to pass a resolution directing President Trump either to withdraw the armed forces attacking Iran or win congressional approval to continue waging the war. That the Republican-controlled Senate will go along with this is not exactly what the smart money is telling us, and even if it did, there’s no chance that this or a kindred resolution would have anywhere near the two-thirds support required to override a Trump veto.


But the House action comes on the heels of other Republican pushbacks to our l’état c’est moi president. Senate Republicans’ refusal to bring up the appropriations bill for ICE and the Border Patrol until Trump scraps his proposed $1.8 billion slush fund for his acolytes and goons has compelled Trump and his attorney general to say that proposal has been discarded. (Some Republicans, not to mention every Democrat, remain skeptical until it’s clear that a stake has been driven through the slush fund’s heart.) The other by-product of Trump’s suit against his government—the deal between Trump and his government exempting him, his family, and his businesses from any audits of their past tax filings—may yet pose one more stumbling block to Republicans all too aware that Trump’s self-dealing may drag way too many of them down in November’s midterms.

Now, another small band of House Republicans (seven, to be precise) have signed on with the 211 House Democrats to present the House with the required number of members (218) to take up yet another bill that Speaker Mike Johnson and the Republican leadership would have preferred to bury. In this instance, the bill that the discharge petition will bring to the floor, probably next week, isn’t a move against any Trump misdeed or even a specifically Trumpian policy. Rather, it chips away at one aspect of our deficient labor law that favors businesses over their workers.

The bill—the Faster Labor Contracts Act, authored by Rep. Donald Norcross (D-NJ) and co-sponsored by Rep. Pete Stauber (R-MN)—seeks to rectify one of the glaring deficiencies in the National Labor Relations Act, which imposes no limits on the time period between a company’s workers’ vote to unionize and reaching their first contract with their employer. According to a study by Bloomberg Law, the average time that elapses between the workers’ vote and their first contract is 458 days, and many employers, including some of America’s largest and richest companies, refuse to bargain with their workers at all. It was four years ago, for instance, that workers at Amazon’s massive Staten Island processing warehouse voted to go union, and Amazon has yet even to sit down with those workers to commence bargaining. The NLRA neither imposes a time limit on this process, nor provides any significant penalty for companies that delay bargaining or refuse to bargain altogether.


https://prospect.org/2026/06/04/how-pro-worker-bill-may-advance-in-the-house/