NLRB rules that ballots employees already cast in vote to oust union cannot be counted, highlighting Labor Board’s pro-union boss bias

Washington, DC (June 21, 2022) – The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) in Washington, DC, has permitted the destruction of hundreds of ballots already cast by Michigan Rieth-Riley Construction Company workers in an election whether to oust International Union of Operating Engineers (IUOE) union officials. The decision shuts down a years-long effort by Rieth-Riley employees to remove IUOE Local 324 officials, allowing the union to stifle the workers’ vote with questionable “blocking charges” against Rieth-Riley management.

Rieth-Riley employee Rayalan Kent led the effort to vote out IUOE union officials. With the assistance of National Right to Work Foundation staff attorneys, he submitted two petitions in 2020 with enough worker support to trigger the NLRB’s administration of a “decertification vote.” A vote finally occurred in October 2020, but Regional NLRB officials in Detroit ruled, just hours before the ballots were to be counted, that union boss-concocted “blocking charges” invalidated the employees’ petition. The NLRB in Washington has now affirmed that decision.

Both rulings fly in the face of Foundation-backed reforms the NLRB adopted in 2020 regarding “blocking charges,” which provided that ballots in union decertification elections should be counted first before any unfair labor practice charges surrounding the election are dealt with. Moreover, even prior NLRB precedent required that an evidentiary hearing be held to determine whether there is any “causal nexus” between union allegations of employer misconduct and employee dissatisfaction engendering a union decertification effort. But the NLRB never held any such hearing in this case.

Settlements Foundation attorneys won in 2021 for Rieth-Riley employees Rob Nevins and Jesse London indicate that malfeasance by IUOE officials, not Rieth-Riley misdeeds, likely caused the company’s workers to push for the union’s ouster. London and Nevins decided to end their union memberships and keep working to support their families despite a union boss-ordered strike in 2019.

Nevins charged union officials with threatening to “blackball” him if he didn’t strike, and London reported that IUOE officials refused to hand over health insurance premium money they owed him for time he participated in the strike. The settlements mandated that IUOE union bosses not discriminate against London and Nevins for exercising their right to refrain from union membership, and also ordered them to pay London the health insurance premium money he was owed.

“The current decision demonstrates how the NLRB and its bureaucrats have twisted a law that is allegedly designed to protect the free choice rights of rank-and-file workers. Instead of supporting workers’ rights, this Board and past Boards have weaponized the National Labor Relations Act against workers solely to entrench union boss power,” commented National Right to Work Foundation President Mark Mix. “Rather than apply the letter and spirit of the 2020 Election Protection rule, Joe Biden’s NLRB has undermined and rendered useless even those modest reforms. Given this awful ruling, it is now likely that Rieth-Riley workers’ votes to remove the union will simply be dropped in a trash can.”

Mix added: “Workers have a statutory right to vote out a union they oppose and NLRB bureaucrats should not be able to nullify that right on the basis of unproven and often unrelated allegations of employer misconduct.”

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.