Efforts in Ohio and California come as Biden-Harris NLRB tightens restrictions on workers voting out unions
Petaluma, CA & Dover, OH (August 20, 2024) – Employees at auto dealership Hansel Ford of Petaluma have successfully forced unwanted International Association of Machinists (IAM) Local Lodge 1596 union officials out of their workplace. The victory comes after about 80% of Hansel Ford workers signed onto a petition seeking a vote to oust the union. Hansel Ford employee Gustavo Pena submitted the petition to National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) Region 20 in San Francisco with free legal aid from the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation.
The NLRB is the federal agency responsible for enforcing federal labor law, which includes administering elections to install (or “certify”) and remove (or “decertify”) unions. Pena’s decertification petition contained well over the 30% threshold of employee signatures needed to trigger a decertification vote under NLRB rules. However, before the NLRB could schedule a union decertification vote among Pena and his coworkers, IAM union officials filed paperwork disclaiming interest in continuing their control over the workplace.
Because California lacks Right to Work protections for its private sector workers, IAM union officials had the legal power to enforce contracts that required Pena and his colleagues to pay dues or fees as a condition of getting or keeping a job. In Right to Work states, in contrast, union membership and financial support are strictly voluntary.
Now that Pena and the other Hansel Ford workers have forced the IAM union out, they are free of both union officials’ power to contract and speak for all employees in the work unit (including the majority who opposed the union) and the union’s power to force them to pay dues to support their activities.
Technicians at Ford Dealership in Ohio Also Force Out IAM Union Bosses
Foundation staff attorneys also assisted technicians at Parkway Ford in Dover, OH, in requesting a decertification election to remove IAM Local 1363 union officials from their workplace. The worker who submitted this petition, Ryan Graham, also obtained signatures from a majority of his coworkers, well in excess of the 30% needed to prompt a vote.
Before NLRB Region 8 officials could schedule a vote at Graham’s workplace, however, IAM union bosses filed paperwork disclaiming interest in continuing their monopoly bargaining power over the workplace. This may have been to avoid an embarrassing rejection by employees at the ballot box.
Ohio is also not a Right to Work state, meaning that IAM union officials had the power to compel Graham and his fellow technicians to pay union dues or fees as a condition of keeping their jobs. While Supreme Court precedents like General Motors v. NLRB and the Foundation-won Communications Workers of America v. Beck prohibit union officials from forcing workers to formally join a union or pay for its non-bargaining-related activities (such as politics), many workers may prefer to decertify an unwanted union that does not respect those rights.
In nearby Michigan, Foundation-assisted mechanics from Brown Motors, a Ford dealership in Petoskey, recently voted in a “deauthorization election” to end Teamsters union officials’ forced-dues power over them. A “deauthorization election” is the only way outside of decertifying a union to end forced-dues demands in a non-Right to Work state and is petitioned for in a way similar to a decertification vote.
The new efforts come as decertification petition filings have gone up over 40 percent since 2020 (according to NLRB data) and worker interest in joining a union is at a historic low. Despite workers’ desire to get away from unions that don’t serve their interests, the Biden-Harris NLRB has just issued a final rule which will make it much harder for rank-and-file workers to exercise their right to vote out union officials they oppose. One part of the new rule lets union officials prevent decertification votes from going forward by filing unverified “blocking charges” alleging employer interference.
“The employees from Ford dealerships in California and Ohio are just the latest examples of the many workers across the country who want to exercise their right to dissociate from union officials that they disapprove of,” commented National Right to Work Foundation President Mark Mix. “That the Biden-Harris NLRB is paring back this right shows that the current administration is interested in giving its union boss political allies more power to siphon money from workers, as opposed to defending those workers’ individual rights.”
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.
