**High Point, NC (October 17, 2006)** – Today, a group of Thomas Built Buses employees filed an appeal with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit challenging a District Court decision to dismiss their lawsuit against the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) for denial of their constitutional due process rights after union representation was forced upon them.

The lawsuit, originally filed in April with free legal assistance from the National Right to Work Foundation, alleges that the NLRB improperly refused to allow workers to challenge the results of a tainted union election that granted United Auto Workers (UAW) union officials monopoly bargaining power over roughly 1,200 employees at the Thomas Built facility.

The NLRB officials decreed that employees may not intervene to assert their rights and challenge union representation election results because they lack standing. The precedent-setting decision contradicts the notion that the National Labor Relations Act establishes rights for employees, rather than simply empowering union officials. Foundation attorneys point out that the ruling violates workers’ procedural due-process rights under the U.S. Constitution.

The NLRB’s procedural decision whitewashed the illegal eleventh hour intervention of Thomas Built to assist its hand-picked union in winning monopoly bargaining representation over the employees. In June 2005, one day before a union representation election, Thomas Built officials issued a surprise memo to all High Point workers, announcing that employees would have to pay higher health insurance premiums if they remained nonunion.

Working in tandem, UAW union operatives immediately circulated copies of the memo around the facility with “DID YOU SEE THIS” THE COST OF BEING NON-UNION JUST WENT UP!” written at the top. Employees opposing unionization report that this intervention by the company swung a large number of votes in favor of the union.

Under longstanding NLRB practice, such conduct requires that the election be set aside because it taints the employees’ vote. Union and company officials, however, wanted the same election result and did not file objections. When a group of employees tried to object to the tainted vote, NLRB officials refused to recognize them. The UAW union was then certified as the monopoly representative because, according to an NLRB regional director, “no timely objections have been filed.”

“Thomas Built employees must be allowed to challenge this unlawful last-minute intervention that clinched an election victory for the UAW union – or workers’ rights under the law will be sharply undercut,” said Stefan Gleason, vice president of the National Right to Work Foundation. “When the NLRB becomes a rubberstamp for union-employer collusion, it seriously undermines the credibility of a federal agency that is supposed to protect the rights of rank-and-file workers.”

Facing prosecution by the NLRB in early 2005, UAW union and Thomas Built officials agreed to cancel outright a company-wide sweetheart deal in which union officials had unlawfully bargained to limit workers’ wage demands and made other concessions in exchange for the company’s assistance in organizing the workers. After the union was forced out of the plant, however, UAW union officials petitioned for the election at issue in this case.

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.