The U.S. House took a groundbreaking, bipartisan step Wednesday to curb the use of non-disclosure and non-disparagement agreements to silence survivors of sexual harassment in the workplace. The latest: The Speak Out Act is now headed to President Biden’s desk after passing the House 315 -109. it had passed the Senate unanimously in September.

“Sometimes we’ll be like one or two Republicans and call something bipartisan,” Rep. Cheri Bustos (D-Ill.), a co-sponsor, said at a news conference Wednesday afternoon. “This is not one of those examples.” This is the second #MeToo bill passed this year, and together these bills represent “the most important labor legislation of this century,” Bustos said.

Why it matters: The bill comes a little more than five years after the #MeToo resurgence captured the nation’s attention and demonstrates the far-reaching reach of this social movement.

Wednesday’s vote is a victory for former Fox News anchors Gretchen Carlson and Julie Roginsky, whose nonprofit Lift Our Voices was founded in 2019 specifically to end this type of collusion and who lobbied for the bill. . “The only way to end the vicious cycle of abuse is to end the vicious cycle of silence,” Carlson said Wednesday.

Zoom Out: NDAs gained more public attention in 2016 when Carlson sued her boss, network chairman Roger Ailes, as a way to circumvent her agreement. (He eventually settled that suit and is still bound by an NDA he signed with the network. Ailes died in 2017.)

NDAs exploded further into the public consciousness in 2017 after Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein’s history of sexual misconduct was covered in The New York Times and The New Yorker.

The bill applies only to those agreements signed before a dispute arises — the kind of document you might agree to on your first day on the job or even before you start. It also doesn’t apply to other types of complaints – wage theft or age or race discrimination, for example.

The bill does not make clear what counts as “disagreement”. Some would argue that this means a lawsuit, while for others it may simply mean that an employee has filed a complaint with HR. Courts should toe that line, Bloomberg Law noted.

Go Deeper: Congress Set to Restrict Use of Sexual Harassment NDAs This story has been updated with additional details.