After being unionized through coercive “card check,” workers are blocked from holding secret ballot vote by biased NLRB rules

Milwaukee, Wisc. (June 3, 2019) – A clerical employee at trucking company USF Holland’s Milwaukee, WI facility has just asked the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) to overturn an NLRB Regional Director’s dismissal of her petition to hold a vote to decertify the Teamsters Local 200 union as the monopoly bargaining agent at her workplace.

Diane Damask’s petition, filed with free legal assistance from National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation staff attorneys, challenges the so-called “merger doctrine,” which allows union officials to “merge” employees in a small bargaining unit into a much larger one to block them from voting to decertify the union. Damask’s request for review notes that the Teamsters performed such a scheme at her small clerical office in an agreement with USF Holland – without fully explaining the ramifications to the employees.

According to the request for review, Region 18’s dismissal of her petition wrongly stifles her rights because it “makes it effectively impossible for employees in such mega-units to exercise their…rights to decertify a union through a secret ballot election” under the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA). As the petition points out, this is not the first time the workers’ statutory rights to hold a decertification election to remove a union they oppose has been stifled by internal NLRB rules not mandated by the NLRA.

The Teamsters originally had scheduled an NLRB-supervised unionization election in January 2018, but then cancelled the vote after cutting a backroom deal with USF Holland to bypass the protections of a secret ballot vote, and instead unionize the workers through the coercive “card check” process. Upset by the situation, Damask and her colleagues quickly circulated a petition to trigger a secret ballot decertification vote only to be told by the NLRB that – under the controversial “voluntary recognition” bar adopted by the Obama NLRB – the workers would have to wait up to a full year before they could file a petition.

Having waited a full year for the NLRB-created “bar” after a card check to expire, now the workers – a majority of whom signed the decertification petition – find themselves blocked again from holding a secret ballot vote by a merger agreement over which they had no real say. In fact, it was not until after Damask had her decertification petition rejected that she learned that, according the merger agreement, she and her eight coworkers at their facility were now deemed part of a nationwide “mega-unit” of approximately 24,000 employees working for multiple employers.

Because triggering a decertification vote requires the signatures of thirty percent of workers in the bargaining unit, under the “merger” such a petition is virtually impossible as she would need to collect 7,000 signatures from workers across the country she has no way of even locating.

Damask’s petition argues that the Teamsters and USF Holland improperly “‘waived’ the Milwaukee clerical employees’ rights under the [NLRA] to decertify an unwanted union” and that “if the…clerical employees constituted a separate appropriate unit for purposes of selecting the Teamsters to represent them…the Board should still consider them a(n)…appropriate unit for purposes of removing the union.”

“This case shows how union bosses, aided by biased NLRB-concocted rules, can trap workers in union ranks for years even when a majority of the workers want out,” said National Right to Work President Mark Mix. “It’s time for the NLRB to stop dragging its feet and reform its arbitrary rules, including the so-called ‘merger doctrine,’ that are being used to eviscerate workers’ statutory right under the National Labor Relations Act to hold a vote to remove a union opposed by a majority of employees.”

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 more than 250 cases nationwide per year.