Today the National Mediation Board (NMB) issued its final rule simplifying the process workers under the Railway Labor Act can use to decertify a union they oppose. National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation President Mark Mix issued the following comment regarding the rule change:

At long last the National Mediation Board is providing airline and railroad workers covered by the Railway Labor Act a straightforward way to remove unwanted union “representation” through a decertification vote.

The previous system – where workers had to create a “straw man” union just to challenge an incumbent union – only served to stymie workers’ rights and demonstrated the historic bias of the NMB in favor of compulsory unionism. In fact, it wasn’t until the Foundation-won case of Russell v. NMB in 1983 that workers even had an established legal right to throw off their union “representative,” albeit only through the unnecessarily complicated strawman system which is now finally being replaced with a simplified process to allow workers to exercise that right.

The Foundation has long advocated this type of change in the union decertification process and we are pleased the NMB has – as we called upon it to do in comments filed earlier this year – finally made this commonsense reform.

The full rule can be read here.

In April the Foundation submitted formal comments during the NMB’s rulemaking procedure. Those comments can be read here.

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.