Washington, DC (April 21, 2015) – Three construction employees have joined a federal lawsuit challenging the National Labor Relations Board’s (NLRB) recently-enacted regulations that further give union organizers the upper hand over independent-minded employees during unionization campaigns.

With free legal assistance from National Right to Work Foundation attorneys, Shannon Cotton, Michael Murphy, and Jorge Gonzalez Villareal, joined a lawsuit pending in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. The lawsuit was initially filed by Washington, DC-based construction company Baker DC, LLC seeking an injunction to halt implementation of the new rules.

The federal Board-mandated rules are designed to dramatically shorten the time individual workers have to share information with their coworkers about the effects of unionization. Most ominously, the regulations require employers to hand over to union organizers workers’ private information, including their personal phone numbers and email addresses.

The ambush election rules were rushed out on December 15, 2014, the last day of former union lawyer Nancy Schiffer’s term on the Board. The NLRB had previously rushed the regulations out before former Service Employees International Union (SEIU) lawyer Craig Becker’s term expired in December 2011, but they were later invalidated by a federal district court in 2012 on procedural grounds.

The three employees who joined the lawsuit object particularly to the part of the rules that requires job providers to hand over employees’ personal information to union officials. They challenge that provision as a violation of workers’ privacy.

«The Obama Labor Board’s latest give-away to Big Labor will ambush unsuspecting workers into union ranks and invades the privacy rights of employees who may oppose unionization in their workplace,» said Mark Mix, president of the National Right to Work Foundation. «We applaud these workers’ stand for the privacy rights of all employees who oppose this federal government dictate that their personal contact information be handed over to unaccountable union organizers against their will.»

The National Right to Work Foundation has previously filed amicus briefs in two other cases pending in federal courts that challenge the new NLRB ambush election rules.

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.