**Hartford, CT (July 24, 2007)** – The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) has denied a local Colt Manufacturing employee’s request for a ruling now in his precedent-setting case that has already languished at the federal agency for four years.
With free legal help from attorneys at the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, George Gally, a 40-year veteran Colt employee, originally filed unfair labor practice charges at the NLRB in March 2003. Gally is challenging the United Auto Worker (UAW) union’s nationwide policy of barring employees from paying for union political activities unless they object annually.
Rather than decide the long-pending case, the NLRB instructed its Region 34 to set a hearing date before an Administrative Law Judge, claiming that the record in the case is insufficient to issue a final decision.
In the Foundation-won U.S. Supreme Court *Communications Workers v. Beck* decision, the court recognized that workers have the right to refrain from formal union membership and cannot be forced to pay for activities other than monopoly bargaining. But UAW officials have eviscerated the Supreme Court’s Beck and related appellate court rulings by requiring Gally and his co-workers to renew their objections every year – a hurdle intended to discourage them from reclaiming their forced union dues.
Meanwhile, Gally has endured 16 years of illegal conduct by UAW officials. In December 2003, a federal Administrative Law Judge awarded Gally nearly $31,000 in compensation plus interest for pay lost after he was illegally fired at the order of UAW Local 376 union officials in 1991. Prior to his award, Gally filed the unfair labor practice charges challenging the UAW union officials’ annual objection scheme.
“Justice delayed is justice denied,” said Stefan Gleason, vice president of the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation. “By its pathetically slow processing of employee rights complaints, the NLRB helps UAW officials trap workers in union ranks. This situation underscores why Connecticut needs a Right to Work law that would make union affiliation and dues payment strictly voluntary.”
Gally’s case is one of many long-languishing cases at the NLRB, a federal bureaucracy long criticized for political in-fighting and institutional bias favoring compulsory unionism. In recent months, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit ordered the labor board to decide promptly another Foundation-assisted case that began 17 years earlier in 1989, when Schreiber Foods employees Sherry and David Pirlott first filed their challenge to being compelled to fund coercive union organizing drives.
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.
