Posts tagged House Republicans
Faster Labor Contracts Act passes House after GOP rebels join Democrats
June 10, 2026 // The bill, though, exposed a trend of more populist Republicans bucking House leadership and free-market conservative groups that had been traditional allies of the GOP. Steven Bernstein, co-chair of the Fisher Phillips law firm’s labor relations practice group, said in a statement ahead of the vote that the legislation if enacted would “lead to a sea change in the country’s well-established labor dynamic by taking away the rights of employers and unions to decide for themselves what goes into their initial collective bargaining agreements.”
The Faster Labor Contracts Act violates the principles of voluntary agreement
June 8, 2026 // Most troublingly, the bill would do real harm to the very workers its supporters claim to help. Workers are often told that unionizing will give them a greater voice in the workplace. They are promised a seat at the table and a meaningful role in shaping the terms and conditions of their employment. But under the Faster Labor Contracts Act, workers would lose one of the most important forms of workplace democracy — the right to vote on the contract that governs their jobs. That loss of voice has far-reaching implications: In an industry that supports 55 million working Americans, it affects not only retail workers but also the employers that depend on a stable and collaborative workforce. If bargaining reaches the FLCA’s deadline, workers would be shut out of the process entirely. They would have no right to ratify the agreement, no right to reject it, no right to demand changes, and no meaningful ability to influence the final outcome.
WSJ Op-ed: Republicans for Federal Worker Collective Bargaining
December 15, 2025 // The 20 GOP union abettors are Don Bacon (Neb.), Mike Bost (Ill.); Brian Fitzpatrick, Robert Bresnahan and Ryan Mackenzie (Pa.); Gabe Evans (Colo.); Andrew Garbarino, Nick LaLota, Michael Lawler, Nicole Malliotakis (N.Y.); David Joyce and Michael Turner (Ohio); Thomas Kean Jr., Christopher Smith and Jefferson Van Drew (N.J.); Mariannette Miller-Meeks and Zachary Nunn (Iowa); Pete Stauber (Minn.); David Valadao (Calif.) and Derrick Van Orden (Wis.). Many of these Republicans represent swing districts, but making government less efficient and responsive to the American people is unlikely to help them win re-election.
Unions back amendment to shield Pentagon employees
November 24, 2025 // Rep. Donald Norcross (D-N.J.) is pushing to include Section 1110 in the National Defense Authorization Act, which would reinstate bargaining rights for the department’s civilian staff, countering President Donald Trump’s March and August executive orders. The measure has drawn enough GOP interest that more than a dozen House Republicans urged Armed Services committee leaders in both chambers to keep the language in the final bill. Unions including the American Federation of Government Employees have argued that the Trump administration’s actions leave the largest segment of the federal workforce without the ability to bargain. “It affects a huge workforce,” Daniel Horowitz, AFGE’s legislative director, told Shift. “It’s 250,000 bargaining-unit employees for us at the Defense Department, and other unions have thousands more. So it’s really important in terms of restoring collective bargaining.”
House GOP panel accuses nation’s largest teachers union of exploiting members’ retirement benefits
September 29, 2025 // Committee Chairman Tim Walberg of Michigan and committee members Rick Allen of Georgia, Kevin Kiley of California and Virginia Foxx of North Carolina shared a Securities and Exchange Commission filing that showed retirement services provider Security Benefit paid the nation’s largest teachers’ union a $4 million annual “base fee” for the exclusive right to sell annuities and mutual funds to teachers in 2023-24. They noted that Department of Labor reports show the NEA receiving more than $61 million in “service level agreement” or “advertising revenue” since 2005, even as the union maintains in its 2024 SEC filing that it received “no dividends, royalties, profit, or licensing fees” from Security Benefit.
Op-ed: She looked like a pro-worker Trump cabinet appointee. But now she’s gutting the Labor Department
July 17, 2025 // The standards on the chopping block include those issued by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, a unit of the Labor Department, that were developed after years of effort. OSHA standards, Reindel told me, take an average of seven years — and as long as 20 years — to draft. “This is an onslaught on people’s basic protections at work.”
Pro-labor Republicans push Trump to rescind order busting most federal unions
April 3, 2025 // “This executive order, which ruthlessly strips collective bargaining agreements for over 1 million federal workers, is the most recent attack your administration has levied against our merit-based civil service in the effort to cut the workforce and replace them with political cronies,” they wrote. “While the CSRA does give the president the authority to limit collective bargaining agreements due to national security concerns, the executive order’s direction to terminate mass swaths of federal employee collective bargaining agreements is clearly intended to broadly dismantle the CSRA, which is specifically designed to grant federal employees the right to collective bargaining as a means to resolve workplace issues while maintaining the smooth functioning of government operations.”
The Latest: Judge temporarily blocks Trump plan offering incentives for federal workers to resign
February 6, 2025 // Federal workers associations have filed suit asking a federal court to stop the Trump administration’s “effective dismantling” of the lead U.S. aid agency. The lawsuit by the American Foreign Service Association and the American Federation of Government Employees comes as the new Trump administration and ally Elon Musk are targeting the U.S. Agency for International Development for eradication, freezing its funds and placing almost all of its workers on leave or furlough.
Commerce agency near ‘collapse’ over telework, layoffs, union says
June 3, 2024 // Lawmakers, especially Republicans, have been wary of widespread remote work, saying customer service backlogs at government agencies including the Social Security Administration and the IRS prove the case for more in-person staff. Just last week, the acting director of the Office of Personnel Management, the federal government’s HR department, assured lawmakers that more than half of all federal employees work in-person full time.
Nation’s largest federal employee union endorses O’Malley to lead Social Security
August 22, 2023 // O’Malley’s nomination comes at a time when the agency he was chosen to lead is at a crossroads. House Republicans and the White House differ on how much to fund SSA in fiscal 2024 to the tune of nearly $2 billion, which administration officials are is needed to avert calamity within the agency. The union, for its part, estimates that more than $17 billion—$2 billion more than Biden request—is needed to shore up the agency’s workforce and operating procedures. And following years of conflict and deadlock at the bargaining table, AFGE and Social Security management reached an agreement last month to update a portion of their union contract, which includes commitments to set up regular union-management cooperation council meetings both at the national level and within the agency’s subcomponents, as well as plans to improve training for new employees and to boost some benefits like child-care subsidies.