On September 3, 2026, Iowa Starting Line's Amie Rivers asked a simple question about the three Iowa Republicans in the U.S. House: they all say they are fighting for Iowa workers, so how do they actually vote when a bill for workers reaches the floor?

She picked three bills. Not tax bills dressed up as help for "working families," but three bills that do one narrow thing: make it easier for a worker to join with their coworkers and bargain.

The roll calls are public. We pulled all three from the House Clerk. Here is what they show.

The one that reached the floor this year: all three voted no

The Faster Labor Contracts Act deals with a problem that sounds procedural and isn't. When workers vote to form a union, the company is supposed to sit down and negotiate a first contract. Nothing forces it to hurry. Employers can stall for years, and workers who voted for a union end up with nothing to show for it.

The bill sets a clock. If there is no agreement after 90 days of bargaining and 30 days of mediation, an outside panel can set a two-year contract instead of letting the delay run forever.

House Republican leaders did not want a vote on it. Supporters went around them, using a discharge petition — a rule that lets a majority of members drag a bill onto the floor over leadership's objection. It worked. On June 9, 2026, the House passed it 230 to 193, with 20 Republicans crossing over to vote yes.

None of the 20 was from Iowa.

• Ashley Hinson — Nay
• Mariannette Miller-Meeks — Nay
• Zach Nunn — Nay

Randy Feenstra, Iowa's fourth Republican, voted no too. Iowa's House delegation was unanimous against the only union bill that got a floor vote this year.

The federal workers' bill: Hinson voted no, Miller-Meeks and Nunn didn't

In March 2025 President Trump signed an executive order stripping collective bargaining from federal workers, using a national security exception in a 1978 law. He signed a second order in August 2025 that widened it. Together the two orders ended bargaining for more than a million federal workers. Counted alongside an earlier decision to end bargaining at the Transportation Security Administration, the Center for American Progress puts the total at one in every 14 workers in the country covered by a union contract.

The Protect America's Workforce Act would undo those orders and put the contracts back. It also got to the floor by discharge petition, and on December 11, 2025 it passed 231 to 195.

Here the Iowa delegation split:

• Miller-Meeks — Yea
• Nunn — Yea
• Hinson — Nay
• Feenstra — Nay

Miller-Meeks and Nunn were two of the 20 Republicans who voted to restore those workers' rights. Hinson was not. She voted with the 195 who left the executive orders standing, and she is the one now asking Iowans to promote her to the U.S. Senate.

The PRO Act: two no votes, and one member who wasn't there yet

The Protecting the Right to Organize Act is the broadest of the three. It bans the mandatory anti-union meetings companies make workers attend, stops employers from dragging out union elections on false pretenses, and adds real financial penalties for breaking labor law — which current law largely lacks.

The House passed it on March 9, 2021, by 225 to 206. Hinson and Miller-Meeks were both freshmen that year. Both voted no.

Nunn is not on the roll call at all — he did not take office until January 2023. But when the bill was reintroduced in February 2023 and gathered 219 cosponsors, no member of Iowa's delegation signed on.

What this costs Iowa

Iowa is not a heavily unionized state. In 2025, 6.8% of employed Iowans were union members, against 10.0% nationally. That is often presented as a reason these votes don't matter much in Iowa.

It is the opposite. A first-contract clock and a ban on captive-audience meetings matter most where unions are weakest and employers face the least resistance, because those are the places where stalling works. The three bills above are not about protecting unions that already exist. They are about whether workers who want one can get to a contract at all.

These are also not close calls buried in a thousand-page package. Each of the three was a standalone bill about one thing. Two of them only reached the floor because a majority of members had to force leadership's hand. There was no cover in these votes and no complexity to hide behind.

Hinson, Miller-Meeks and Nunn are not alone in this. We have written about the 195 House Republicans who voted to keep federal workers' contracts cancelled, and about the Republicans with the worst records on workers and unions generally. What is specific to Iowa is that all four of its Republicans voted the same way on the one bill that got through this year.

What the roll calls show

Ashley Hinson, Mariannette Miller-Meeks and Zach Nunn all voted against the Faster Labor Contracts Act on June 9, 2026, the only bill for union workers to get a House floor vote this year, and one that passed anyway with 20 Republican votes. Hinson also voted against restoring bargaining rights to about a million federal workers in December 2025, when Miller-Meeks and Nunn voted for it, and against the PRO Act in 2021. Iowa's union membership rate is 6.8%, well under the national 10.0%.

Source

Hinson, Miller-Meeks, Nunn's records on worker-friendly bills — Amie Rivers, Iowa Starting Line, September 3, 2026. Roll-call votes independently verified against the Office of the Clerk of the U.S. House of Representatives.