24 Jul 2007

Employee Rights Group Reacts to Attorney General Abbott’s Long-sought Legal Action to Enforce Texas’ Right to Work Law

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**Corpus Christi & El Paso, TX** (July 24, 2007) – National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation Vice President Stefan Gleason made the following statement regarding Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott’s long-sought legal action this afternoon to initiate the state’s enforcement of the highly popular Right to Work law:

“The National Right to Work Foundation welcomes the Attorney General to our ongoing battle to prevent the erosion of Texans’ Right to Work. No employee should be forced to pay union dues just to get or keep a job. But the violations Foundation attorneys uncovered in Corpus Christi and El Paso may only be the tip of the iceberg.

“Evidence obtained several months ago by Foundation attorneys during a federal labor board trial suggests that Big Labor’s phony ‘exclusive federal enclave’ scheme to violate the Right to Work law is widespread. Foundation attorneys are pressing ahead to protect all employees who are victim to this compulsory unionism scheme, and we urge the Attorney General to do the same.

“Union officials must be put on notice that a Texan’s Right to Work is sacred. Every violation must be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, or union officials will only be emboldened.”

**Background**: National Right to Work Foundation attorneys are currently representing two Texas security guards in cases before the National Labor Relations Board and have convinced federal officials to prosecute the Security, Police and Fire Professionals of America (SPFPA) union for unlawfully threatening the security guards’ jobs. Foundation attorneys first brought Texas Right to Work law violations to the attention of the Office of the Attorney General in November 2006. Today’s action is the first formal legal action taken by the State.

In April, Foundation attorneys filed federal charges for Carlos Banuelos, an Asset Protection and Security Services guard in Corpus Christi, against the SPFPA union and his employer after union officials unlawfully threatened to have him (and other employees) fired for asserting their legal right to refrain from formal union membership and payment of union dues.

Meanwhile, in recent days, Foundation attorneys successfully secured the reinstatement of Juan Vielma, a security guard for AKAL Security in El Paso, whom union officials had illegally suspended without pay for over a year for refusal to pay dues. Agreeing with charges filed by Foundation attorneys last November, a federal Administrative Law Judge ruled in June that SPFPA union officials had no legal authority to compel Vielma to pay dues.

Texas is one of 22 states that have a Right to Work law, ensuring that union membership and dues payment are strictly voluntary.

9 Jul 2007

Federal Labor Board to Prosecute Union for Threatening to Have Security Guards Fired for Refusal to Pay Union Dues

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**Corpus Christi, TX (July 9, 2007)** – Spearheading an effort to prevent erosion of Texas’ highly popular Right to Work law, National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation attorneys have persuaded National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) officials to prosecute a union for unlawfully threatening local security guards’ jobs. But the state’s own prosecutors have yet to take formal legal action to enforce multiple violations of Texas law.

Carlos Banuelos, a local Asset Protection and Security Services guard, filed federal charges in April against the Security, Police and Fire Professionals of America (SPFPA) union and his employer after union officials unlawfully threatened to have him (and other employees) fired for asserting their legal right to refrain from formal union membership and payment of union dues.

Banuelos’ charge details how the SPFPA union hierarchy maintains an illegal monopoly bargaining agreement with his employer that makes financial support for the union a mandatory condition of employment. Union officials enforced that illegal requirement and ordered Banuelos and his coworkers to pay a fee to the union or face termination. Texas is one of 22 states that have a Right to Work law, ensuring that union membership and dues payment are strictly voluntary.

This is the second complaint issued within months in Texas where Foundation attorneys have helped employees fight back against unlawful dues demands from the SPFPA union hierarchy. SPFPA union officials falsely claim that Banuelos and his coworkers work on an “exclusive federal enclave” that is not protected by the Right to Work law – and thus can be forced to pay union fees as a condition of employment.

Foundation president Mark Mix reiterated his earlier requests to Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott to investigate and aggressively prosecute widespread violations of the Right to Work law. In oral argument in a parallel case, an attorney for another company with a contract with the SPFPA union even boasted that they require employees to pay dues “across the country in Right to Work states.” Evidence shows union officials have established these forced dues requirements at multiple worksites under apparently fraudulent agreements.

“Union officials are trampling the employee freedoms provided under Texas law,” said Mark Mix, president of the National Right to Work Foundation. “The time has come for Attorney General Greg Abbott to take aggressive action to stop union officials from thumbing their noses at his state’s Right to Work law.”

In the parallel case in El Paso, Foundation attorneys successfully secured a reinstatement offer for Juan Vielma, a security guard for AKAL Security whom union officials had illegally suspended without pay for over a year for refusal to pay dues. Agreeing with Foundation attorneys, a federal Administrative Law Judge ruled that SPFPA union officials had no legal authority to compel Vielma to pay dues.

9 Jul 2007

Staunch Employee Opposition Forces Union out of Multiple Kaiser Permanente Facilities Across Southern California

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**Los Angeles, CA (July 9, 2007)** – A group of four Kaiser Permanente employees have forced the Service Employees International Union-United Healthcare Workers (SEIU-UHW) union to abandon multiple Kaiser Permanente units across the Southern California area after use of coercive union organizing methods. The action comes in the wake of unfair labor practice charges the employees filed just weeks earlier on June 21, and it will impact up to 400 Kaiser Permanente employees throughout the area.

National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation attorneys helped Lisa Eklund and three of her co-workers file the federal charges at the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) against the SEIU-UHW union and Kaiser. The charges alleged that union officials deceived Kaiser employees into signing union “authorization” cards that would later be counted as “votes” favoring unionization. Union officials also falsely told employees that signing the card was merely a request for more information about unionizing and promised higher pay raises and benefits. Lastly, SEIU-UHW officials engaged in unlawful bargaining over the employees’ wages and working conditions before the employees had even selected union officials as their representatives.

On December 28, 2006, Kaiser management recognized SEIU-UHW on the basis of the “card check” count. However, Eklund’s charge highlights that SEIU-UHW union officials manipulated the size of the bargaining unit and secured signatures from employees who were ineligible to participate in the “card check” organizing drive. Upon the heath care employees’ request to disclose the names of employees who were eligible to participate, union officials were unable to indicate which employees were inside or outside of the alleged bargaining unit.

Within two weeks of filing the federal charges, the NLRB indicated its intention to formally investigate the apparently unlawful “card check” organizing scheme. Upon the NLRB Region 21’s initial investigation, SEIU-UHW union officials and Kaiser rapidly abandoned the “card check” count.

“SEIU officials have been repeatedly caught red handed running roughshod over employee rights during these coercive organizing drives,” said Stefan Gleason, vice president of the National Right to Work Foundation. “These campaigns give employees two basic choices- union ‘yes,’ or union ‘yes.’”

“Card check” union organizing strips workers of the limited protections of a government-supervised secret ballot election in deciding whether or not to unionize. Instead, union agents frequently mislead or badger workers one-on-one into signing cards that are then counted as “votes” favoring unionization.

Only months earlier National Right to Work Foundation attorneys forced SEIU Local 49 to abandon the coercive “card check” union organizing process in Oregon and Washington for six months because of repeated and widespread abuses.

3 Jul 2007

Treasure Island Foods Employees Vote to Kick Unpopular Union Out of All Six Chicago-Area Stores

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Chicago, IL (July 3, 2007) – Late yesterday, Treasure Island Foods employees successfully voted by over a 2-to-1 margin to kick the unwanted United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) union out of all six area stores. The employees received free legal aid from the National Right to Work Foundation in overcoming three years of legal challenges by UFCW union lawyers to obtain the “decertification” vote, which was conducted by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB).

The final tally in the election was 189 employees against the union, 91 in favor, with five votes being contested. As a result of the election, over 300 employees at all six Treasure Island Foods stores in the Chicago area will become nonunion and free to negotiate over their own wages and working conditions.

Treasure Island employees originally filed for the decertification election in 2004, after UFCW officials ordered an unpopular boycott and fell out of favor with the vast majority of employees. Even though the employees’ petition was timely filed, UFCW Local 881 and 1546 officials stonewalled the vote by filing a series of “blocking charges” at the NLRB.

In 2005, after obtaining signatures from an overwhelming majority of employees at the grocery chain, Dan Schalin and his coworkers filed another decertification election petition at the NLRB. Threatened by the independent-minded employees’ petition, UFCW union officials continued to abuse the legal process by filing further unfounded blocking charges.

Finally, with help from attorneys at the National Right to Work Foundation, Schalin and his coworkers requested that the petition for decertification be reinstated. In late May, the NLRB Regional Director ruled in favor of their request and scheduled the election.

“UFCW officials have thrown up every stumbling block possible over three years to block Treasure Island employees from exercising their free choice,” said Stefan Gleason, vice president of the National Right to Work Foundation. “The hostility of the union hierarchy to workers’ interests shows why Illinois needs a Right to Work law that would make union affiliation and dues payment strictly voluntary.”

A decertification election, an NLRB-supervised secret ballot election to oust a union, is an uphill battle for workers to obtain or win. In particular, union lawyers are adept at gumming up the works by filing baseless charges that often block an election for years. Employees can only obtain such elections during narrowly proscribed periods every few years, and incumbent union hierarchies often retaliate against dissenting employees.

28 Jun 2007

Employee Rights Group Wins Security Guard’s Reinstatement After Year-Long Suspension for Refusal to Pay Union Dues

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El Paso, TX (June 28, 2007) – After a year-long ordeal, El Paso security guard Juan Vielma received an offer of full reinstatement to his job yesterday after he was illegally suspended in 2006 without pay – in violation of Texas’ Right to Work law. But a national employee rights organization pressed the state’s top prosecutor to aggressively pursue numerous other violations of the Texas Right to Work law still occurring.

Immediately after Vielma contacted National Right to Work Foundation attorneys for help, they filed unfair labor practice charges at the National Labor Relations Board in early November 2006 against the Security, Police and Fire Professionals of America (SPFPA) union. Union officials and AKAL Security suspended Vielma indefinitely without pay over a year ago in retaliation for asserting his protected right not to pay union dues.

AKAL Security and union officials had claimed, with no basis whatsoever, that Vielma and his coworkers work on an “exclusive federal enclave” not protected by Texas’ Right to Work law prohibiting forced union dues.

The reinstatement offer comes after a federal Administrative Law Judge agreed with arguments presented by Foundation attorneys and ruled unequivocally earlier this month that the Texas Right to Work law applies to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facility where Vielma worked. The judge also ordered the payment of full back pay and benefits. Testimony at trial in March revealed that AKAL and union bosses had no basis for claims that the Right to Work law did not apply to the El Paso ICE facility. The trial also revealed the existence of an illegal union scheme to violate the law across Texas and in other Right to Work states.

Foundation president Mark Mix today reiterated his earlier request of Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott to investigate and aggressively prosecute widespread violations of the Right to Work law. Foundation attorneys first brought these violations to the attention of the Attorney General’s office on November 21, 2006.

“Although we are pleased that Mr. Vielma will finally be allowed to return to work, there is much more work to be done. Not only should the Attorney General prosecute existing violations and obtain monetary penalties available under the law, but he should also take aggressive action that puts all Texas union bosses on notice that violations of the Texas Right to Work law will no longer be tolerated,” said Mix.

Foundation attorneys have uncovered evidence that SPFPA union officials have been engaging in a willfully fraudulent scheme to force potentially thousands of employees to pay union dues in violation of the state’s Right to Work law.

The Texas Attorney General has been asked to prosecute these criminal violations of the Right to Work law as well as enforce the state’s fraud and other applicable criminal statutes.

In addition to Vielma’s case, Foundation attorneys are helping Carlos Banuelos, a Corpus Christi security guard who filed federal charges against the same union. SPFPA union officials unlawfully threatened to have Banuelos and other employees fired for refusing to pay union dues.

28 Jun 2007

Federal Judge Tosses Out Union Lawyers’ Frivolous Suit to Block SFO Security Screeners’ Election to Rid Workplace of Forced Union

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San Francisco, CA (June 28, 2007) — A federal judge has agreed with National Right to Work Foundation attorneys and thrown out a desperate, last-ditch effort by union lawyers to prevent employees from voting in a government-supervised secret-ballot election. 900 airport security screeners at San Francisco International Airport (SFO) will finally have the right to end the practice of forcing employees to pay union dues just to keep their jobs.

With 900 screeners forced to pay up to $800 each per year, Service Employees International Union (SEIU) officials stand to lose as much as $720,000 annually in compulsory dues if the employees succeed. The federal labor board has not yet set a date for the election.

The SEIU lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, named the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) Region 20 Director, as well as appointed Members of the NLRB in Washington, DC. The frivolous suit claimed that these officials somehow do not have the discretion to permit employees to exercise their statutory right to an election. SEIU lawyers filed the suit despite the fact that the NLRB has final jurisdiction over such “deauthorization” elections, and the federal court had no legal authority to enjoin the election.

Led by Stephen Burke, a four and a half year employee of Covenant Aviation Security at SFO, the screeners are upset that SEIU officials became their monopoly bargaining agent in the first place – without a secret-ballot election, but rather through a coercive “card check” campaign – and almost immediately ordered them to pay union dues or be fired from their jobs.

Under coercive “card check” unionization, unlike a government-supervised secret ballot election, union operatives may browbeat dissenting workers into signing cards later counted as “votes” favoring unionization. Since union officials gained monopoly bargaining power over them, many screeners have reported that the union hierarchy is unresponsive and unwilling to do anything other than collect forced dues. Many screeners have reported that this dissatisfaction fostered the deauthorization effort.

Hundreds of SFO security screeners apparently object to the mandatory union dues requirement. Over 45 percent of Burke’s coworkers signed the deauthorization petition, far beyond the 30 percent necessary to trigger the NLRB supervised-election. If a majority of all employees in the bargaining unit vote in favor of deauthorization, union officials will be stripped of their special privilege to compel payment of dues.

“SEIU union officials have unsuccessfully thrown every roadblock possible in place to stonewall SFO screeners from exercising their free choice,” said Stefan Gleason, vice president of the National Right to Work Foundation, a charitable organization that is providing free legal assistance to the screeners. “Without the ability to withhold dues, employees have little leverage to hold union officials accountable for their actions.”

SEIU officials had previously tried to block the employees from obtaining the deauthorization election by challenging signatures collected in opposition to the forced dues clause before it took effect. However, the NLRB in Washington, DC, recently rejected that challenge and ordered the election to proceed.

22 Jun 2007

Court Strikes Down Ohio Law Forcing Public Employees to Pay Union Dues Unless They Join Certain Religions

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**Columbus, OH (June 22, 2007)** — In a victory for employee rights and the freedom of conscience, a St. Marys-area teacher has successfully challenged the constitutionality of a statewide law denying public employees their right to accommodations of religious objections that they have to paying union dues unless the objecting employees belong to certain state-approved religions.

The decision issued by U.S. District Court Judge Gregory Frost struck down the offending law as a violation of the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause and permanently enjoined the Ohio State Employment Relations Board (SERB) from further enforcing the law against employees.

With free legal help from National Right to Work Foundation attorneys, Carol Katter, a 21-year veteran teacher in the St. Marys school district, filed the original complaint in January in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Ohio’s Eastern Division against top officials of the SERB for religious discrimination.

In her complaint, Katter informed the Court that, even though she is a lifelong Catholic with religious objections to the union’s agenda, she was denied her right to a religious accommodation. Katter believes that failing to divert her forced dues from the Ohio Education Association (OEA) union to a charity contradicts her beliefs due to the union hierarchy’s position on hot button political issues such as abortion.

Adding insult to injury, an OEA union official told Katter that she must “change religions” to receive a religious accommodation before SERB. Katter’s complaint challenged the state statute as an unconstitutional establishment of religion and an infringement of her religious free exercise rights. Because Judge Frost struck down the statute on Establishment Clause grounds, he did not need to decide the issue of whether the SERB had violated Katter’s free exercise rights.

The ruling in Katter’s case follows another federal court decree issued last fall that re-affirmed that all public sector employees who have sincere religious objections to union affiliation cannot be forced to associate with and pay dues to a union they find objectionable. That decree was in another Foundation-assisted case challenging similar systematic religious discrimination throughout Ohio. However, for technical reasons, Ohio’s SERB itself was not formally bound by that decree even though it was well aware of its existence.

“Carol Katter’s struggle is part of a pattern of OEA union officials’ willingness to trample on the religious beliefs of the very employees they claim to represent just to stuff their pockets with more forced dues,” stated National Right to Work Foundation Vice President Stefan Gleason. “While the ruling expands the rights available to employees of faith, abuses of forced unionism will inevitably continue until Ohio passes a Right to Work law making union membership and dues payment strictly voluntary.”

Katter also filed a related charge with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) against the OEA union, a state affiliate of the National Education Association, challenging an attempt by union officials to divert her forced dues to the local union rather than a charity. Currently the EEOC is still investigating the charge.

Download the Federal Court’s Ruling

21 Jun 2007

Employee Rights Advocate Urges Attorney General to Prosecute Pattern of Apparent Union Fraud and Violations of Texas Right to Work Law

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**Springfield, VA (June 21, 2007)** – While defending several employees’ legal rights, attorneys from the National Right to Work Foundation have uncovered evidence that Security, Police and Fire Professionals of America (SPFPA) union officials in Texas have apparently been engaging in a fraudulent scheme to force potentially thousands of employees to pay union dues in violation of the state’s Right to Work law.

Today, Foundation President Mark Mix wrote a letter to Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott asking for enforcement of the state law that prohibits forced unionism.

The National Right to Work Foundation’s investigation indicates that union officials and certain contractors at federal government facilities within the State of Texas are willfully signing monopoly bargaining agreements illegally requiring employees to pay union dues that also appear to contain fraudulent statements.

In November 2006, Foundation attorneys first asked the Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott to prosecute criminal violations of the Texas Right to Work law. No formal action has yet been taken by the Attorney General’s office to prosecute the documented abuses of employees in multiple local Texas jurisdictions, particularly Corpus Christi and El Paso.

20 Jun 2007

Education Week Covers Foundation’s Supreme Court Case

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*This article originally appeared in Education Week*

**High Court Upholds Wash. State Law on Union Fees**

By Mark Walsh

*Washington*

The U.S. Supreme Court dealt a defeat to teachers’ unions last week by upholding a Washington state law that required them to get the consent of nonmembers to spend their representation fees on political activities.

But the court’s unanimous ruling on June 14 will likely do little harm in the long run to the Washington Education Association or other public-employee unions, legal experts said.

The court declined suggestions from so-called right-to-work groups to reconsider some of its basic precedents in the area of “agency fees,” which unions collect from nonmembers because they benefit from collective bargaining even though they haven’t joined.

The National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, a Springfield, Va.-based organization that represented a group of nonunion teachers in the Washington state case, said workers opposed to having their agency fees go for unions’ political agendas “are little better off after today’s ruling.”

The Supreme Court “avoided the more critical and far-sweeping question—whether union officials should be able to automatically collect forced dues for politics from nonunion members in the first place,” the foundation said in a statement.

**Unions Not ‘Hurt’**

Robert H. Chanin, the general counsel of the National Education Association, the parent of the WEA, said, “The court could have hurt us, and chose not to, and reaffirmed what we have been doing for 25 years.” He was referring to the complex rules for collecting and accounting for the proper use of agency fees that the high court has addressed in several cases.

Justice Antonin Scalia, writing for the court in Davenport v. Washington Education Association Requires Adobe Acrobat Reader (Case No. 05-1589), said it does not violate the First Amendment speech or association rights of public-sector unions if states require them to seek an “affirmative authorization” before spending nonmembers’ money on election-related activities.

“We do not think that the voters of Washington impermissibly distorted the marketplace of ideas when they placed a reasonable, viewpoint-neutral limitation on the state’s general authorization allowing public-sector unions to acquire and spend the money of government employees,” Justice Scalia wrote.

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Stephen G. Breyer and Samuel A. Alito Jr. declined to sign on to some portions of Justice Scalia’s opinion, but the underlying judgment was unanimous.

Washington state amended the statute last month. The revised law clarifies that unions don’t need authorization for using nonmembers’ agency fees for political and other non-bargaining-related purposes as long as a union has enough money in its general treasury to pay for such activities.

Some legal experts had expected that the change, enacted by a Democratic governor and legislature some 15 years after state voters had approved the “opt-in” requirement in a ballot initiative, would lead the Supreme Court to send the case back to the Washington state courts without a full opinion.

But both sides had told the court the change in law did not make the case moot. Justice Scalia agreed, saying in a footnote that money damages were still at stake.

State officials noted that more than $500,000 in fines levied by the state against the WEA for violations of the earlier statute were also still dependent on the outcome of the case.

“The union is still subject to hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of fines,” Rob McKenna, the attorney general of Washington state, said in an interview. He said that unions were within their rights to seek a change to the law through the political process, as they did, but that his office was intent on defending the 1992 ballot initiative.

“The union clearly lost on the question of whether the law it violated was constitutional,” added Mr. McKenna, a Republican. “There’s no way to put a spin on losing a case 9-0 in the U.S. Supreme Court.”

But Mr. Chanin of the NEA said “the outcome is just fine from our point of view.” He added that he thought there was a good chance that the WEA’s fines would be reduced after further lower-court proceedings.

The case originated with a state probe of the WEA in 1994 after the union instituted a dues increase, partly to offset an anticipated drop-off in political contributions because of the 1992 initiative.

In 1998, the state reached a $430,000 settlement in a case against the union. In a subsequent legal action by the state, the union faced a judgment of $590,000 for failing to abide by the opt-in measure. The WEA was also sued by a group of four teachers who were not members of the union and objected to the use of their agency fees for political purposes.

In March 2006, the Washington Supreme Court struck down the 1992 law. The court said the law imposed a burden on the teachers’ union of confirming that a nonmember does not object to having his agency fees spent on electoral purposes. That burden may have infringed on the union’s First Amendment right of “expressive association,” the court said.

The U.S. Supreme Court’s decision threw out the state high court’s ruling and sent the case back for further proceedings in the state courts.

**Modest Returns**

In its arguments on behalf of the nonunion teachers, the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation had urged the justices to rule that a phrase from a 1961 high court labor precedent applies only to voluntary union members, not to nonmembers.

In *Machinists v. Street*, which upheld the idea that nonunion members should not get a free ride when they benefit from a union’s bargaining activities, the Supreme Court at that time further said that “dissent is not to be presumed—it must affirmatively be made known to the union by the dissenting employee.”

The right-to-work group said that phrase was not meant to apply to nonunion members, whose refusal to join the union has already served to register dissent to the union’s acting on their behalf.

Justice Scalia said the Washington high court mistakenly relied on the “dissent is not to be presumed” principle to conclude that a nonmember bears the burden of objecting before a union may be barred from spending his or her fees for impermissible purposes.

The high court’s precedents set a “constitutional floor” for procedures to evaluate unions’ collecting and spending of agency fees, Justice Scalia said, not a “ceiling” for measures that states may enact.

Justin Hakes, the legal-information director of the National Right to Work foundation, suggested that his group has soured on the effectiveness of “paycheck protection” measures for nonunion workers.

“We don’t feel the underlying [1992] law was effective,” he said. The group contends that unions were able to evade the Washington state provision by changing their accounting methods and taking other steps to fall outside the scope of the regulation, which focused on election-related matters.

Timothy M. Sandefur, a lawyer with the Pacific Legal Foundation, which filed a friend-of-the-court brief on the side of the nonunion workers, said the Supreme Court’s ruling makes it clear that the states may enact stronger measures to attempt to guarantee that nonunion workers’ fees are not mis-used.

But even measures such as Washington state’s 1992 law returned relatively little money to such workers, adding to the ineffectiveness of the requirement.

“It doesn’t pay much for you to refuse to join the union—maybe five bucks back” after a year-end accounting of whether expenses were related to bargaining or not, Mr. Sandefur said.

18 Jun 2007

Federal Labor Board Finds Union Officials Guilty of Forcing Firing of Security Guard Who Didn’t Pay Dues

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**El Paso, TX (June 18, 2007)** – After attorneys from the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation helped Juan Vielma file federal charges at the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), an administrative law judge ordered the local security guard’s reinstatement and back pay for his unlawful firing for exercising his right to cutoff payment of all union dues, a right protected by Texas’ Right to Work law.

But Foundation attorneys anticipate another attempt by union officials to stall the security guard from reclaiming his job by appealing the decision to the NLRB in Washington, DC. Vielma has yet to receive any back pay for wages he would have earned over the past year if he was still employed.

The Texas Attorney General has so far failed to prosecute these violations of the state’s Right to Work law, a criminal statute.

Vielma, an AKAL Security employee, prompted the NLRB to issue a complaint and prosecute the Security, Police and Fire Professionals of America (SPFPA) union and his employer after he was unlawfully suspended without pay in retaliation for asserting his legal right not to pay union dues. AKAL and SPFPA union officials falsely claimed Vielma worked on federal property that is not protected by Texas’ Right to Work law, and thus could be forced to pay union dues or be fired.

After a hearing before the NLRB, Administrative Law Judge Gregory Z. Meyerson ruled that the SPFPA union hierarchy must submit a written request to AKAL requiring Vielma’s reinstatement, as well as reimburse all his lost earnings and benefits since his termination. Additionally, union officials must cease and desist from enforcing contract clauses that make payment of union dues a requirement of employment –– and union officials must post notices at the El Paso facility and SPFPA union headquarters informing employees of their right to resign from union membership and cut off all dues payment.

“Because the Texas Attorney General’s office is so far AWOL, Vielma is stuck with the slow moving processes of the NLRB,” said Stefan Gleason, vice president of the National Right to Work Foundation. “Union officials are trying to destroy Mr. Vielma for standing up for his rights.”

The ruling described union lawyers’ last-ditch attempt to keep Vielma out of work as “a final effort in what appeared to be the inevitable” when they argued that the National Labor Relations “Act be ignored in any matters involving national security.” The ALJ referenced another Board decision to show that “this same Union argued that the NLRB has jurisdiction over airport screeners…whose work is obviously regulated by Homeland Security.”

Parallel to Vielma’s case, Foundation attorneys are helping Carlos Banuelos, a Corpus Christi security guard who filed federal charges against the SPFPA union. SPFPA union officials there are similarly attempting to enforce a forced dues contract clause in violation of Texas’ Right to Work law, which prohibits forced dues.