Upper Sandusky, Ohio (January 12, 2004) – Employees at Dana Corporation’s Upper Sandusky facility have filed a petition with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) asking that officials of the nation’s largest auto workers union be stripped of their newly granted exclusive representation power over nearly two hundred of the company’s employees.

With free legal aid from National Right to Work Foundation attorneys, Clarice Atherholt
filed the decertification petition signed by 35 percent of her coworkers after Dana Corp. began bargaining with the United Auto Workers (UAW) union without allowing the employees to cast a secret ballot. Atherholt is challenging the NLRB’s new “voluntary recognition bar” that stipulates generally that employers may bargain with a union for a period of one year after the implementation of a collective bargaining agreement before the agency will allow employees to obtain a decertification election.

The employees were denied the opportunity to decide their union status through the less abusive secret ballot election process, but they are seeking that opportunity to vote now.

If a decertification election is allowed and is successful, the UAW would lose its power to act as the “exclusive bargaining representative” of the employees. All Dana employees then would be free to negotiate their own terms and conditions of employment.

“Workers should have a right to cast off the unwanted monopoly representation of union officials at any time,” said Stefan Gleason, Vice President of the National Right to Work Foundation. “It’s an outrage that Dana Corp. struck a backroom deal with UAW officials to deny them their rights.”

In early December, the collective bargaining agreement was implemented pursuant to a so-called “neutrality” agreement and a “card check” authorization process – a process that bypasses a secret ballot election and allows union officials to bully workers one-on-one into signing union recognition cards. In recent years union organizers have had less success in persuading employees to vote in favor of unionization, and thus have focused on eliciting employer support to corral workers into union collectives through methods that are intended to curtail employee influence over the union recognition process.

National Right to Work Foundation attorneys have three other cases pending against Dana and the UAW union for abuses under these coercive agreements. Currently, there are two cases on appeal in Virginia and Kentucky, as well as a recently filed round of charges pending in Michigan.

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.