In the wake of National Labor Relations Board’s (NLRB) move to kill the only protection workers have against card check forced unionism, the U.S. House Committee on Education and the Workforce held a hearing yesterday about the recent onslaught of the NLRB’s pro-forced unionism rulings as former-Chairwoman Wilma Liebman’s term expired late last month.

Testifying at the hearing was Barbara Ivey, who works at a Portland, Oregon-based IT unit at Kaiser Permanente.

Ivey and 60 of her coworkers were subjected to a Service Employees International Union (SEIU) card check forced unionization campaign (via a neutrality agreement).

Many of Ivey’s coworkers reported that they were misled or pressured by SEIU organizers into signing union cards, and didn’t even know what they meant.

After the SEIU succeeded in gaining enough cards to claim monopoly bargaining privileges over the workers, the workers were told that if they didn’t like it, they could file with the NLRB for a secret-ballot decertification election (per Foundation-won precedent in Dana) to overrule the card check campaign and remove the unwanted union.

After leaning about her rights with the assistance of Foundation staff attorneys, Ivey collected the necessary amount of signatures on a petition for a secret-ballot election.  But then, on August 26, 2011, the Obama NLRB overruled the Dana precedent in Lamons Gasket and the election was summarily cancelled.

Now, the employees in the Kaiser IT department are stuck with the SEIU for anywhere from one to four years before they will even have a chance to force a secret-ballot vote (and getting a decertification vote is a major uphill battle for employees who will have campaign against an entrenched union with full-time paid professional organizers).

Yesterday, Ms. Ivey shared with Congress her experiences with the unfairness of card check unionization and the one-sidedness of the Obama NLRB. You can read Barbara Ivey’s testimony by clicking here (pdf).

You can watch the video of the hearing here.