Reform follows changes long advocated by National Right to Work Foundation, which has litigated hundreds of cases for workers seeking to oust unwanted unions

Washington, DC (April 1, 2020) – Citing comments from the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) today formally issued a final rule eliminating some of the barriers that workers face when attempting to exercise their right to vote to remove an unwanted union.

National Right to Work Foundation President Mark Mix issued the following statement on the NLRB’s final rule:

While this NLRB still has much more to do, this long-awaited rule represents a significant step forward towards fully protecting the statutory right of employees under the Act to remove a union opposed by a majority of workers.

The blocking charge policy that is finally being modified has always been particularly odious in its treatment of employee rights, in that it allows union officials’ allegations against an employer to be grounds for blocking the statutory rights of employees who are not accused of any wrongdoing. Needless to say, in any other context, union bosses would be howling about employer conduct being used as grounds for blocking employees’ rights under the Act, yet here they support nullifying workers’ rights on the basis of any unproven allegation.

There are still additional non-statutory barriers to decertification that should to be eliminated, but we are encouraged that the Board took this step and thankful it made modifications to the proposed rule as advocated by the Foundation in its comments.

The rule reforms how the NLRB deals with union “blocking charges,” which are filed by union officials to prevent rank-and-file employees from exercising their right to vote to remove a union. Under the old rules, unions could block workers’ requested votes from taking place for months or even years by making allegations against the employer.

Under the new rule, union unfair labor practice charges cannot stall a vote from taking place. Additionally, and in apparent response to the Foundation’s comments, the NLRB modified its proposed rule so that in most cases ballots will be counted and not impounded, with the tallies released promptly.

The NLRB also substantially eliminated the so-called “voluntary recognition bar,” which was used by union officials to block workers from requesting a secret ballot election after a union was installed as the monopoly bargaining agent through an abuse-prone “card check” drive that bypassed the NLRB-supervised election process. The Trump NLRB did so by reinstating a system secured by Foundation staff attorneys for workers in the 2007 Dana Corp. NLRB decision. Although thousands of workers used the Dana process to secure secret ballot votes after being unionized through abusive card checks, the Obama NLRB voided employees’ Dana rights in 2010.

Additionally, the NLRB adopted the changes supported by the Foundation’s January comments to crack down on construction industry schemes through which employers and union bosses unilaterally install a union in a workplace without first providing proof of majority union support among the workers. Foundation staff attorneys represented a victim of such a scheme in a key case (Colorado Fire Sprinkler, Inc.) that ended when a U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals panel unanimously reversed the Obama Board and ruled for the worker who had been unionized despite no evidence of majority employee support for the union.

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.