Most Employees Don't Know They Can Vote Out Their Union. That's a Problem.

When the media covers labor stories, the story line is almost always the same: employees organize, a union comes in, everyone wins. 

It's a tidy narrative. It's also only one side of the story.

The other side — when employees remove a union from their workplace — rarely makes headlines. But it happens constantly.

A recent piece in Reason magazine put some numbers to it. Over the past decade, employees held more than 1,600 decertification elections across the country. The Teamsters were the most common target, with employees successfully voting them out in more than 60 percent of those cases. 

Why vote out the union? Drivers were unhappy with "poor vacation, poor pay, subpar benefits." Plant employees discovered that their nonunion counterparts at the same company were getting quarterly bonuses and better sick leave. Other employees were stuck under a contract they never voted for, negotiated decades before they were even hired.

These stories don't get covered very often. But there's another reason most employees don't know they have an alternative to poor representation: the process of decertification itself is obscure. The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) — the federal agency that oversees these elections — offers only two small paragraphs of guidance on how decertification works on its website.

The information gap is real, and it has consequences. Employees who are unhappy with their union often have no idea that a path out even exists, let alone what it takes to get there. Decertification can be a tricky process, with specific legal steps and a host of issues if you don't know what you're doing.

That's the gap the Center for Independent Employees was built to fill. 

Employees have the right to remove a union that isn't working for them. We have a national network of expert labor attorneys to guide employees through every step of the decertification process — and we win nearly every case we take. 

There are two sides to every story. And we're here for the side that doesn't make the news.

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The Center for Independent Employees (CIE) is a 501(c)(3) legal defense foundation that provides legal representation and assistance to independent employees who are opposed to union oppression in their workplaces.