Having failed in both 2014 and 2019 to get the workers of Chattanooga’s Volkswagen (VW) plant to vote them into power, United Auto Workers (UAW) union officials on their third attempt appear to have laid the groundwork to seize control of the plant with no employee vote at all.
Here’s how this is possible: As a result of sweeping changes recently made by former union lawyers currently sitting on the Biden administration’s National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), UAW organizers now have a new mechanism to bypass the NLRB’s traditional secret ballot vote process. The UAW is already taking legal steps to do just that.
Last August, in a split decision, the NLRB threw out the decades-old rulebook for union organizing campaigns.
Under its new Cemex doctrine, the NLRB will now force a company to recognize a union based on “card check,” a process that uses “authorization cards” collected by union organizers as a substitute for votes in a secret ballot election.
In theory, a company can insist on a secret ballot vote under the Cemex policy by rushing a vote request to the NLRB, but doing so doesn’t mean the NLRB will conduct an election. Union boss-friendly NLRB members can use any union allegation — UAW lawyers have already filed four such cases — for skipping a secret ballot election entirely, or later overturning a vote that goes against the UAW.