Project 2025 Tracker / What’s done, what’s next

18. Department of Labor and Related Agencies · Major · Needs Congress

Amend the NLRA to make national employment laws negotiable defaults

Not started

603 18. Department of Labor and Related Agencies

“Congress should amend the NLRA to authorize collective bargaining to treat national employment laws and regulations as negotiable defaults. For example, this reform would allow a union to bless a relaxed overtime trigger (e.g., 45 hours a week, or 80 hours over two weeks) in exchange for firm employer commitments on predictable scheduling.”

What has happened

  1. Not started

    No bill has been introduced in the 119th Congress that would let collective bargaining override federal employment statutes as negotiable defaults, and no such provision appears in any of the 104 public laws enacted. The NLRA amendments that did move in the House are narrow and unrelated — a joint-employer definition (H.R. 4366) and hours-worked and tipped-employee changes to the Fair Labor Standards Act — none of which creates the waiver mechanism the Quote describes.

    No action found yet. This entry is the starting point, not a finding.

Research log

What was searched, and what didn’t count as evidence

Research notes

Negative search (playbook 1.6).

  • bills.ndjson title match on National Labor Relations: H.R. 8272 (locum tenens independent-contractor classification, referred), H.Res. 988 and H.Res. 1140 (rules providing for consideration of FLSA and NLRA bills), and no negotiable-defaults bill.
  • bills.ndjson title match on overtime: fifteen bills, all tax treatment of overtime pay or the FLSA overtime threshold; none authorizes a bargained-for overtime trigger.
  • Federal Register full-text, “negotiable defaults”, since 2025-01-20: 0 documents. Full-text "waiver" "National Labor Relations Act": 3 documents, none on point.
  • public-laws.ndjson (104 laws): no NLRA amendment.

This is a Congress-only ask with no executive substitute available — an agency cannot make a statute waivable — so there is no executive workaround to log either.

Action
other
Object
National Labor Relations Act
ID
1660