Employee objected to union membership and financial support during orientation meeting; union taking dues under guise of altered form
Houston, TX (February 21, 2023) – Cypress-area Kroger employee Jessica Haefner has just hit the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) union at her workplace and her employer with federal charges. Haefner maintains that union and Kroger officials are unlawfully seizing union dues from her paycheck based on an altered union membership form that ostensibly indicates her consent to union dues deductions, even though she followed instructions on how to exercise her right to refrain from union membership and support. Haefner filed the charges at the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) with free legal representation from National Right to Work Foundation staff attorneys.
Haefner’s charges state that UFCW Local 455 union officials’ actions violate her and her coworkers’ rights under Section 7 of the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), which guarantees American private sector workers’ right to abstain from any and all union activities. The NLRB is the federal agency responsible for enforcing the NLRA.
Texas’ Right to Work protections also prohibit union officials from forcing private sector workers like Haefner to join or pay dues to a union as a condition of getting or keeping a job. In contrast, states lacking Right to Work laws permit the firing of private sector workers for refusal to pay money to a union hierarchy.
Union Form Was Altered
On August 22, 2022, Haefner attended a mandatory orientation meeting during which she was required to listen to a UFCW agent, her charges state. The UFCW agent passed out a union membership application and a dues checkoff on a single form that he claimed was mandatory for attendees to complete. Another piece of onboarding literature stated that Kroger management had the “opinion that you should participate and be active in the Union.”
When Haefner asked about how she could exercise her right to refrain from joining the union or paying union dues, the union agent instructed Haefner to write “$0” in the field marked “union dues” on the form. Texas’ Right to Work law protects Haefner’s right to abstain from union membership and dues payment.
Haefner followed these instructions, but later found out that union dues were coming out of her wages, her charges say. Haefner quickly obtained a copy of the form that Kroger and UFCW officials based their dues deductions on, and discovered that the “$0” she had written in the union dues field had been replaced with an amount of several dollars to induce dues deductions from her paycheck.
UFCW Bosses Across Country Illegally Snubbing Worker Requests to Abstain from Union Activity
UFCW’s violation of Haefner’s rights is not an isolated incident. In Pennsylvania, Foundation staff attorneys are also representing Giant Eagle supermarket cashier Josiah Leonatti, who charges UFCW Local 1776KS union officials with refusing to accommodate his religious objections to union membership. His charges say union officials tried to subject him to an illegal “religion test” before they considered granting him an accommodation.
“UFCW union officials seem to adhere to a nationwide policy of prioritizing dues revenue over employees’ free association rights,” commented National Right to Work Foundation President Mark Mix. “Foundation attorneys have already witnessed that UFCW bosses are willing to discriminate against religious employees in the pursuit of more dues deductions, and in Ms. Haefner’s case their malfeasance may be as bad as flat out altering employee forms to deduct dues.”
“As cases brought for workers with free Foundation legal aid show, UFCW bosses have a long and documented history of violating workers’ rights, whether through thousands of dollars in illegal strike fines, illegal religious discrimination, threatening teenagers’ jobs, and now by altering a worker’s dues authorization,” Mix added.
The National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation is a nonprofit, charitable organization providing free legal aid to employees whose human or civil rights have been violated by compulsory unionism abuses. The Foundation, which can be contacted toll-free at 1-800-336-3600, assists thousands of employees in about 200 cases nationwide per year.
