How Donald Norcross got a GOP Congress to take up a pro-union bill

Since Republicans retook control of the U.S. House more than three years ago, Rep. Donald Norcross (D-Camden) hasn’t had much luck getting his GOP colleagues to take up his many pieces of pro-union legislation. That’s about to change.

Earlier this week, Norcross got a 218th signature on the discharge petition – a mechanism that allows a majority of House members to circumvent House leadership and put bills directly on the floor – for his Faster Labor Contracts Act, which focuses on collective bargaining negotiations. Congress skipped town shortly afterwards for Memorial Day, but Norcross anticipates the bill will come up for a vote sometime in early or mid-June. 

The impetus for the legislation, Norcross said, is the fact that it takes an average of more than 450 days for unions and employers to reach a contract, and in many cases negotiations last for years beyond that. That allows some “unscrupulous” employers to deliberately draw out the process indefinitely in order to prevent a contract from ever coming into effect, effectively nullifying the results of a union election in the first place.

“It’s like you get engaged, the ring is on the finger, but you never make it to the altar,” said Norcross, a union electrician by trade.

The Faster Labor Contracts Act would add new deadlines for how quickly negotiations need to proceed, and what happens if no breakthroughs are reached. After 90 days of negotiations, either side can request mediation; if mediation fails, an arbitration panel can step in and impose a two-year contract.

Those policy changes have been on the Democratic agenda for some time, and were a part of the PRO Act, a wide-ranging labor bill that Democrats have been unable thus far to shepherd through Congress. Last fall, with the backing of some labor-friendly Republicans, Norcross decided to put the bargaining deadline provisions into a separate bill in the hopes that a more narrowly tailored effort would have a better chance of succeeding.

Just getting co-sponsors, though, was not enough to get a vote on the bill. So in April, Norcross submitted a discharge petition to force the issue, and set about convincing as many Republicans as possible to sign on; he said the Teamsters, a union with ties to both the Democrats and the GOP, was of great help as well.

Seven Republicans heeded the call, and on May 20, Rep. Nick LaLota (R-New York) officially became signature #218, starting the clock for the bill to come up for a vote.

“Obviously, there are some leaning-towards-labor folks that are on the other side, and I had been working with them for some time,” Norcross said. “Before we decided to go down the road to a discharge petition, we got commitments that there would be a certain number that would sign onto it. And they came through.”

The bill has a total of seventeen Republican co-sponsors, among them New Jersey Reps. Jeff Van Drew (R-Dennis) and Chris Smith (R-Manchester), both of whom have long been among their party’s most labor-friendly votes. (Neither Van Drew nor Smith signed the discharge petition, which stopped accepting signatures once it hit 218.)

While successful discharge petitions were once exceedingly rare, they’ve become increasingly common in recent years, giving Democrats more leverage in the minority than they might otherwise have. In fact, this isn’t the first time this Congress that a Democratic-led discharge petition has forced a vote on labor legislation.

Late last year, all three of New Jersey’s GOP congressmen voted to pass a discharged bill restoring collective bargaining rights for federal employees – a direct rebuke of President Donald Trump’s administration – though the bill later died in the Senate. Smith and Van Drew also helped to kill a GOP-backed labor bill that was opposed by the AFL-CIO when it came up in January.

Those votes speak to a fundamental divide within the GOP: while union members themselves have become increasingly willing to vote for Republicans, many Republican leaders hail from heavily non-unionized states and thus don’t have the same political imperatives as Republican legislators from, say, New York or California. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 16.1% of New Jersey workers are represented by a union, versus just 5.5% in Louisiana, where both the House Speaker and House Majority Leader are from.

Strategies like Norcross’s, then, have become the most reliable way for pro-union legislation to move forward, though Democrats surely hope they can win control of Congress this year and make that process easier.

Assuming it passes the House in June, the Faster Labor Contracts Act will still have to clear 60 votes in the Senate – Senators Cory Booker (D-New Jersey) and Josh Hawley (R-Missouri) are co-leading it there, with three Republicans signed on so far – and earn Trump’s signature. Those are tall hurdles, but Norcross said he’s optimistic.

“I’m told conversations have gone on with the White House,” he said. “I’m hopeful. The fact that we’re actually having a vote on a piece of labor legislation – it’s unheard of.”