What the new NLRB majority should do for workers like me

Four years ago, I worked at the first Trader Joe’s store that ever unionized. I opposed the decision, but when a majority of my coworkers voted in favor, I hoped for the best. My hopes were quickly dashed as the union’s organizers undemocratically pushed themselves into leadership roles and then bargained over pronoun pins, gender-affirming care, and abortion coverage rather than focusing on wages, benefits, and things that directly affected our job.

When a critical mass of my coworkers and I tried to decertify the union, the Biden administration’s National Labor Relations Board refused to allow a vote. I now work at a different Trader Joe’s store, but the experience still upsets me. The board’s job is to protect workers like me, and it failed.

This story was on my mind when the Senate confirmed new members to the National Labor Relations Board one month ago. For the first time in years, the board now has a 3-1 Republican majority. I believe their first order of business should be to end the injustice that stopped me and my coworkers from getting rid of our union. It is time to close the what could be called the “blocking charge” loophole.

Federal law guarantees workers the ability to hold elections, both to unionize and to remove unions through decertification. But under the Biden administration, the NLRB handed union officials the power to delay decertification elections. All a union has to do is file a charge alleging the employer violated federal law somewhere along the way, and the vote stops in its tracks. The workers’ right to a decertification election is simply taken away.

Workers who signed their names asking for the vote are made to watch as their petition sits idle. Meanwhile, the blocking charge winds through investigation and litigation — a process that can drag on for years. The union that workers wanted to remove stays in place the entire time.

In short, the question of who represents them gets answered by everyone except the workers.

This is the unjust barrier that my coworkers and I confronted at the Trader Joe’s store in Hadley, Mass. We had well over the 30 percent threshold of worker support to trigger a decertification election. We actually had 46 percent of workers sign up in support. Had we been given the secret-ballot vote we were supposed to get, I am certain we would have removed the union.

But we never got that vote because our union — Trader Joe’s United — strategically filed charges to block the vote. It alleged that Trader Joe’s had committed a slew of illegal activities, ranging from its dress code to undefined threats against workers. Most of the allegations were years old, even preceding the original unionization election. No matter, though: Biden’s National Labor Relations Board stopped the decertification election in its tracks.

This is not due process. It is a trap door built into the rules to give more power to union leaders at the expense of the workers they claim to represent. That is why, earlier this year, I co-signed a formal petition for rulemaking to the board, asking it to close this loophole. The fix is simple: let elections proceed, resolve the charges separately, and stop letting paperwork substitute for a vote.

Getting rid of blocking charges is the first thing the board should do with its new majority. But it is not the only problem the board can address.

The Biden National Labor Relations Board also tried to stop employers from speaking to workers in all-hands meetings. Union organizers can still reach me at my door or on my phone whenever they want, but the old Board told employers they don’t have the freedom to bring workers together to answer the kind of questions I had about what unionization means for a workplace. The new NLRB majority should instead support policies that allow workers to hear from both sides before they vote.

Then there is the NLRB’s Cemex decision in which the board under Biden ruled that if an employer commits an unfair labor practice during an organizing drive, a union can still be certified — even if the workers voted against it. As someone who fought for the right to have a real vote and lost that fight to procedural maneuvering, I find it difficult to accept that American workers could be organized without their vote counting at all.

Workplace democracy matters to me, because I’ve seen how it works — and how it doesn’t. If union leaders are going to represent workers, they should earn the right, and they should respect workers’ right to get rid of them, too. That’s not the system the NLRB has in place now. Rather, it has tilted the playing field against workers’ choice.

Workers across the country are waiting for a process that is actually fair. The NLRB must ensure that what happened to me and my coworkers never happens to anyone else.

Michael Alcorn is a Trader Joe’s employee and a visiting fellow at the Institute for the American Worker.