In November, GOP lawmakers introduced a suite of sweeping changes to labor law. Each of these bills would make it harder for workers to collectively build and exercise power. Together, these proposals amount to a coordinated attempt to break unions and stifle collective action. Below is a breakdown of the offending bills and how they would harm workers.

1. Worker Reforming Elections for Speedy and Unimpeded Labor Talks (RESULTS) Act: This bill would prohibit card check and instead force unions to hold elections. Card check is a simplified method of certifying a union through majority sign-up; the alternative is a rather drawn out secret ballot election through the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), a process that gives employers ample time to interfere with and sabotage worker organizing. Secret ballot elections give the employer, which is not supposed to have a vote, the ability to exert undemocratic influence over whether workers form a union. Evidence suggests that card check recognition meaningfully increases the success of organizing efforts. To add insult to injury, this bill would raise the threshold for union certification, requiring more than two-thirds of those in a bargaining unit to cast ballots in favor of unionization for the union to prevail. This would serve to deny a workplace majority their right to collectively bargain, which is the actual intended result.

2. NLRB Stability Act: Despite its name, this bill actually undermines a core function of the NLRB: articulating national labor policy. It would effectively strip the agency of its ability to maintain uniform private sector labor standards in the US. Unlike agencies such as the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the NLRB does not have the authority to enforce labor law on its own and instead must work with the courts to do so. However, the NLRB has historically abided by a principle of non-acquiescence. This allows the NLRB to continue articulating its own interpretation of labor law for the country as a whole, even while awaiting the Supreme Court’s review of a more restrictive interpretation from a given circuit. This new bill could allow the most conservative or business-friendly circuit to determine labor rights nationwide. It could also foster a chaotic environment in the event of a circuit split. 

3. Fairness in Filing Act: This bill would require anyone filing an unfair labor practice (ULP) charge to provide supporting evidence at the time of initial filing. ULPs are violations of workers’ rights under the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) and include, for example, an employer retaliating against an employee for supporting a union. Requiring victims to submit evidence when filing ULP charges could dissuade people from filing and holding offenders accountable; many workers are already hesitant to file, and the evidence for ULPs is often hidden and requires outside investigation to uncover. Filing a ULP already uses union resources, but requiring upfront evidence shifts the investigative burden onto workers and unions, who often lack access to employer records and other privileged information. Shifting this burden onto unions could exacerbate the power imbalance between employers and employees in such situations. The bill would also introduce civil penalties for those who file charges deemed frivolous or in bad faith, which could further deter workers from asserting their rights. Unions may need to expend even more resources before filing charges to protect against potential liability, diverting scarce time and funds away from other workers and activities. Like many bills on this list, the name is misleading, as it actually seeks to make the system even more unfair to workers than it already is.

4. Union Members Right to Know Act: This bill would impose new restrictions on how unions can use membership dues. It would require members to repeatedly opt in for their dues to be spent on any activities outside a narrow cadre of representational duties. It would also require unions to provide repeated notices and certify compliance to the Department of Labor. The bill treats worker self-governance as a problem rather than a feature of democratic association. It reinforces the Taft-Hartley Act model of business unionism, where unions function as a dues-for-service insurance policy focused narrowly on contract administration, rather than adopting a more holistic approach to building worker power through class struggle. The business unionism model has coincided with declines in the labor movement’s effectiveness by abandoning the idea of unions as broad vehicles for structural change. By singling out unions for restrictions not imposed on employers or other membership organizations, this bill could weaken unions’ collective capacity and further erode workers’ ability to advocate collectively as a class.

5. Small Businesses Before Bureaucrats Act: This bill would redefine the NLRB’s jurisdictional threshold, increasing the financial minimums by nearly tenfold. This would deprive many workers at smaller businesses of NLRB protections and resources altogether. The name in this case is insulting, conflating the enforcement of worker protections with “bureaucrats.”  It also contrasts starkly with the previous bill on this list, which clearly thinks that unions should be subject to much more bureaucracy than they already are.

6. Protection on the Picket Line Act: This is yet another bill with a name that thoroughly contradicts what the bill actually does. While proponents have tried to present it as a necessary reassertion of harassment protections for workers, the practical effect of the legislative language is to raise the legal standard for qualifying employer discipline as a ULP in those scenarios, not just to reinforce anti-discrimination rights. The bill would let employers take disciplinary action in the context of protected activity unless the NLRB General Counsel first makes a specific showing. This would presumably make it easier for employers to discipline or punish workers engaged in protected actions under Section 7 of the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), while making it harder for workers to hold bosses accountable for retaliation.

7. Worker Privacy Act: Under current law, employers must provide union representatives with employees’ personal contact information before a union election takes place. The bill would amend that requirement by stipulating that employers may share only one form of personal contact information for each employee on the list, and that these employees must opt in to sharing that information in writing. This would have a sizable impact on organizing ahead of union elections. While employers could hold anti-union captive audience meetings during work hours, unions could be forced to rely on less reliable or incomplete contact information during critical stages of a campaign. Workers who don’t know much about the union or the election, or who fear employer retaliation, may choose not to provide contact information, leaving unions unable to communicate effectively with everyone in the unit. This directly undermines one of the NLRB’s core mandates: to ensure fair, informed union elections. Without complete contact information, unions will have a much harder time reaching workers with information about their rights and the election itself, which can depress participation and undermine workers’ ability to choose to join a union.

Taken together, these bills represent a coordinated effort to weaken workers’ ability to organize, bargain collectively, and exercise power through their unions. They do so while adhering to the long tradition of completely dishonest bill-titling, a tradition that includes so-called “right-to-work” laws. While framed in the language of fairness, privacy, stability, or transparency, each proposal ultimately makes things harder for workers by exacerbating the well-documented power imbalance between employers and workers. The consistent throughline is not fairness or stability, but employer control: limiting when workers can organize, how unions can function, and whether labor law can be meaningfully enforced at all.

The Trump regime has occasionally flirted with pretending to support unions (without meaningfully doing so in any way). These bills, however, represent an escalation for the GOP; if all seven were passed, they would constitute the most significant overhaul of US labor law since the Taft-Hartley Act 78 years ago. Each bill targets a different pressure point in the labor relations system, but the cumulative effect is to weaken one of the few ways workers can exercise power against growing corporate influence in every facet of life.