A Chattanooga Volkswagen plant worker, with help from the National Right to Work Foundation, is seeking to overturn a decision that permitted a small group of factory employees to unionize.
Patrick Penderfraft said he was one of the VW skilled trades employees who voted against union representation in a December 2015 election won by United Auto Workers supporters by a margin of 108 to 44.
The foundation assisted him in filing a brief in the Washington, D.C., Circuit of the U.S. Court of Appeals arguing that his vote on union representation was diluted because the so-called micro-unit was substantially made up of pro-union employees rather than the whole workplace which had already rejected unionization.
In February 2014, an election of all the production workers at the plant rejected UAW union representation in a National Labor Relations Board-sanctioned election.
The NLRB later approved the second election of skilled trades workers, or VW employees who work on and repair the robots and other equipment at the factory.
VW later appealed to the appeals court an NLRB order that it bargain with the UAW.