TEAMSTERS JOIN LEGISLATORS TO ADVANCE FASTER LABOR CONTRACTS ACT (Read This First)

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TEAMSTERS JOIN LEGISLATORS TO ADVANCE FASTER LABOR CONTRACTS ACT

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News provided by
International Brotherhood of Teamsters
Apr 20, 2026, 15:30 ET
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O'Brien, Rank-and-File Teamsters Urge Bipartisan Support for Discharge Petition
WASHINGTON, April 20, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Today, Teamsters General President Sean M. O'Brien and rank-and-file Teamsters from Amazon and Corewell Health East joined lawmakers urging U.S. House members to sign onto a discharge petition for the Faster Labor Contracts Act. The petition, which was filed by Rep. Donald Norcross (D-NJ,1^st District), would force a floor vote on the bill.

"In America today, workers are forced to wait 458 days on average before obtaining a first union contract. This is unfair, it's un-American, and it must be fixed," O'Brien said. "This bill needs to move, and it needs to move fast, because working people in this country have been waiting long enough."

The legislation would require employers to meet workers at the bargaining table within 10 days of successfully voting to join a union. The Senate version of the bill was introduced earlier this year by Senators Josh Hawley (R-MO) and Cory Booker (D-NJ) and has continued to gain bicameral support.

"When we won our election to become Teamsters in November 2024, we were eager to get to the table, but it wasn't until June 2025 that we started bargaining for our first union contract. And today, we are still fighting for our first contract nearly a year since we started negotiations," said Rachel Szadyr, a cardiac ICU nurse at Corewell Health East. "When working people vote to organize, they deserve a contract in a timely manner. And if their employers hold things up, they should be held accountable. The case for the Faster Labor Contracts Act could not be any clearer."

Under the leadership of the O'Brien-Zuckerman administration, the Teamsters Union has organized more than 90,000 workers nationwide in just four years, including 10,000 nurses at Corewell Health East in Michigan and nearly 10,000 Amazon workers. Amazon Teamsters alone have been waiting more than four years for the e-commerce giant to enter contract negotiations.

"Amazon, the worst employer in America, refuses to recognize our union even though multiple judges have consistently demanded that it do so," said Novelette Russell, an Amazon Teamster from JFK8 in Staten Island. "The Faster Labor Contracts Act will empower us to address the poverty wages, sky-high injury rates, and other inhumane conditions that Amazon perpetuates by imposing real consequences on employers that think they are above the law."

Founded in 1903, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters represents over 1.3 million hardworking people in the U.S., Canada, and Puerto Rico. Visit Teamster.org for more information. Follow us on X @Teamsters and on Facebook at Facebook.com/teamsters.
Contact:
Kara Deniz, (202) 497-6610
[email protected]
SOURCE International Brotherhood of Teamsters

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This Article from the New York Post

Dangerous Liaison: GOP-Labor Romance
KEN GIRARDIN
20 Apr 2026

The strangest flirtation in Washington is the ongoing courtship between a subset of Republicans and the Teamsters union. It could also be among the most economically destructive. This May Day-November relationship is built around mutual neediness: Union membership is trending down. Only 6% of today’s private sector workers belong to a labor union, down from 10% in the mid-1990s.

Some DC Republicans, most notably Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley, reckon that if they tilt federal labor rules even further in the Teamsters’ and other unions’ favor to help them make up those losses, the unions will be moved beyond words and help the party win more elections. Hawley in particular sees overlap in the Teamsters’ interests — particularly their ongoing crusade against self-driving cars — and his personal brew of grievance-tinged nationalism that broadly treats automation as a threat against the American worker.
The two sides consummated the romance in 2024, when Teamsters head Sean O’Brien spoke at the GOP’s national convention and the union steered a nominal amount of campaign cash to a couple dozen Republican candidates. But are they in it for the long haul?

Labor unions including the Teamsters in 2019 compiled their political wish list into the Protecting the Right to Organize Act, or PRO Act. That sweeping legislation would have made it more difficult for people to work as independent contractors (and easier to unionize them instead), and would have voided state right-to-work laws, allowing unions in Texas, Florida and elsewhere to start forcing workers to pay them or lose their jobs. The PRO Act was so radical that it never became law, even when labor-friendly Democrats controlled
Congress. Enter these Republicans.

Instead of offering flowers and chocolates, they aim to impress labor by slicing up the PRO Act and feeding it piecemeal to the rest of the GOP. The Faster Labor Contracts Act, sponsored by Hawley and Rep. Donald Norcross (D-NJ), is the first portion.It would allow federal mediators to essentially write union contracts for newly organized workplaces, if businesses and unions can’t agree on terms within four months of a union’s workplace election win. First-contract talks at businesses like Starbucks and Amazon can sometimes drag out for years. Putting a time limit on that process sounds innocuous, but it benefits union brass — and harms workers — in two key ways.

Once an employer agrees to a union contract, federal rules prevent their employees from holding another union election for almost three years, and makes it difficult if not impossible to kick the union out even after that. After that contract has been signed, it doesn’t matter how satisfied workers are with the quality of that representation — they’re stuck. The second issue is more sinister. Union contracts cover a wide range of topics, including pay, benefits and work rules. Negotiating a new agreement means sacrificing flexibility, for both sides.

It’s a process that takes time. A hard deadline gives the union extra leverage to win one of its most coveted provisions: “agency shop,” a rule (permitted in about half of states) requiring every employee to either pay the union or get fired.

That’s a financial bonanza for a union, which now often must wait for workers to approve subsequent contracts before trying to sneak agency-shop into the next deal. And nothing would require the resulting windfall to benefit the Republicans who helped make it possible.

The New York Republicans siding, “This May Day-November relationship is built around mutual neediness,” with the Teamsters — Andrew Garbarino, Nick LaLota, Nick Langworthy, Mike Lawler and Nicole Malliotakis — have apparently calculated that potentially subjecting local employers to labor arm-twisting is a good bet in a tough midterm year.
Zooming out, promoting unionization for unionization’s sake would push private-sector businesses toward problems long associated with the public sector: rigid labor rules that make it tougher to adapt or modernize. The likely result will be a broader drag on economic growth, with higher prices for consumers, slower innovation and weaker competitiveness for American firms internationally.

In an economy that needs flexibility to make the fullest use of technologies like AI, the last thing Washington should do is make it harder for businesses to adjust and compete with Chinese and other rivals by literally threatening to write the union contracts for them.

Americans risk mistaking the Republican-Teamsters alliance for a post-partisan project that serves the public interest. It could soon prove that it doesn’t even serve the GOP’s.