Recently the Wall Street Journal published a piece by National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation President Mark Mix titled “Trapped by the Teamsters.”
The op-ed describes the numerous NLRB policies, doctrines and “bars” workers across the country face when merely attempting to hold a vote to oust Teamsters bosses and other union officials as their monopoly bargaining so-called “representative.” The article illustrates these coercive policies through recent examples faced by workers who have turned to the Foundation for free legal aid:
A majority of workers at a Wisconsin trucking company experienced this over the past two years. First, they were blocked from removing their union by the so-called voluntary-recognition bar. This stops workers from decertifying a union for up to a year after the union is installed through “card check”—a procedure that avoids the need for a secret ballot and makes workers vulnerable to union intimidation.
Then, after waiting a year for that bar to expire, the Wisconsin workers found they had been merged by Teamsters officials into a multicompany nationwide bargaining unit of about 24,000 workers. Suddenly the petition to oust the local union was 7,000 signatures short—for a workplace with fewer than 10 union workers. Last month the NLRB declined the Wisconsin workers’ appeal, though a majority of voting board members signaled they would revisit the “merger doctrine” policy in the future.
Other workers face other hurdles: The “settlement bar” blocks a decertification vote because of an NLRB settlement to which the workers weren’t a party; the “successor bar” blocks a vote for up to a year after a company is acquired; the “contract bar” blocks a vote for up to three years after a union contract is forged; and a “blocking charge” blocks a vote while union allegations against a company are pending. None of these are required by law.
The NLRB is addressing the voluntary-recognition bar and blocking charges through the current rule-making process, but the other policies are similarly destructive of workers’ legal right to vote out a union that lacks majority backing. Congress should act to protect workers from being trapped in union ranks they oppose, but in the meantime the NLRB has the authority to eliminate these barriers.
Union officials unable to win the support of a majority of the workers they purport to represent shouldn’t maintain power solely because of bureaucratic rules. Instead, whenever enough workers file a petition to remove a union they oppose, the NLRB should simply let them vote.
Read the whole piece here.
