Richmond, Va. (January 5, 2005) — The United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit has unanimously overturned a controversial National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) ruling that handed union officials the power to force non-union employees across America to wear union insignia on their work uniforms or be fired.

The NLRB made its controversial ruling during the first year of President George W. Bush’s term while the federal labor agency was still dominated by appointees from President Clinton’s second term.

The case began in 1996 when National Right to Work Foundation attorneys assisted BellSouth Communications technicians Gary Lee and James Amburn of Charlotte, North Carolina, in filing charges at the NLRB against the major telecommunications company and Communications Workers of America (CWA) union after learning that BellSouth employees – regardless of union membership – must wear prominent union logo patches or risk being fired from their jobs.

In 1997, the NLRB’s General Counsel issued a complaint against the CWA union and BellSouth for unfair labor practices. The complaint accepted Foundation attorneys’ arguments that forcing non-members to wear the CWA union logo violates their right to refrain from union activity and that the logo gave the false appearance that non-members belonged to or supported the union. (The employees exercised their right not to join the union under North Carolina’s highly-popular Right to Work law.)

However, in a decision filled with tortured legal reasoning – cited by the U.S. Court of Appeals as based on “no evidence” – the NLRB in Washington, DC, ruled that BellSouth’s uniform policy requiring the patch was a “special circumstance,” which trumped the statutory right of workers to refrain from supporting the union.

“No worker should be forced to be a walking billboard for a union seeking to trample their own freedoms,” said Stefan Gleason, Vice President of the National Right to Work Foundation. “This ruling is a small step in reversing the institutional bias of the NLRB in favor of union coercion and against employee free speech.”

The appellate court’s 3-0 decision agreed with Foundation attorneys’ arguments that provisions of the National Labor Relations Act embodied a “right to refrain from wearing union insignia.” The court rejected union and company officials’ claims that the display of the patch alongside the company logo on the uniform was so integral to the “public image” of BellSouth that the mandate superceded the individual rights of workers.

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.