On June 9, the U.S. House passed the Faster Labor Contracts Act, and ten members of Ohio's delegation voted yes — five of them Republicans who got elected calling themselves friends of business.
The bill rewrites the National Labor Relations Act so that the moment a union is certified, an employer gets ten days to start bargaining and ninety to reach a deal before mediation, and if another thirty days slip by, a federal arbitration panel imposes a binding first contract — wages, benefits, even how the schedule gets set — that neither the workers nor the company ever gets to vote on.
The clock starts the day the National Labor Relations Board certifies the union. The NLRB is a five-member federal panel whose majority shifts with whoever holds the White House, and it has a long habit of tipping toward labor when the votes matter. That's the referee this bill puts in charge of the countdown — the same federal government, by the way, that's still chasing the Medicaid fraud it wrote the rules for and never could stop.
Five Republicans looked at the way Ohio employers pay and reward their own people and decided it needed a federal third-party riding shotgun. The math makes that look even stranger: in 2025, just 11.6 percent of Ohio's workers belonged to a union, and across the private sector nationwide, barely six percent carry a card at all.
A House majority rewired federal labor law around roughly one worker in ten, and these five voted to impose it on the other nine: Mike Carey (R-15), Dave Joyce (R-14), Max Miller (R-7), Michael Rulli (R-6), and Mike Turner (R-10).
It doesn't stop at the House. Ohio's own Sen. Bernie Moreno signed on as an original co-sponsor of the Senate version — and Moreno, of all people, made his fortune on a string of Cleveland-area car dealerships that never operated under a collective bargaining agreement. Turns out it's a lot easier to fast-track union contracts onto somebody else's business than to ever run one of your own under the same rules.
Between the five who voted yes and the senator carrying it across the rotunda, not one of these Ohio Republicans has had to make a Friday payroll with the receivables still out, or watched the 401(k) match and the health-plan premiums clear the account in a month when the work never showed up. They just voted to hand those calls to an arbitrator who's never met you — and they'll be home for dinner.
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