Washington State and Louisiana employees seek to overturn anti-worker Labor Board decision limiting employees’ right to end union dues deductions

Tukwila, WA, Hammond, LA (September 15, 2026) – Employees in Tukwila, Washington, and Hammond, Louisiana, are challenging a National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) precedent that allows union officials to block workers from cutting off union dues even when there is no union monopoly bargaining contract in place. The employees filed federal Unfair Labor Practice charges with the NLRB against the International Association of Sheet Metal, Air, Rail, and Transportation Workers and the United Food and Commercial Workers Union (UFCW) at their workplaces with free legal aid from the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation.

The NLRB precedent at issue – Frito-Lay, Inc., 243 NLRB 137 (1979) – gives union officials the power to significantly restrict employee’s right to revoke a dues-checkoff authorization to a narrow, union-created “window period” rather than letting the employee revoke it whenever the underlying union contract isn’t in effect. The result is that employees can be forced to pay union dues to keep their jobs absent a current union contract.

In Washington State, Brittani Butler and four other employees at Holaday-Parks, Inc. resigned from their membership in SMART Local 55 and revoked their check-off authorization after the previous union contract had expired. Despite the requests, Local 55 continued collecting dues from their paychecks and failed to respond to any requests from her or her coworkers. Butler intends to challenge the validity of Frito-Lay’s limitations on employees’ right to cut off dues payments when no union contract exists.

In a similar case, Cypress Meadowlark, an employee at Wayne Sanderson Farms in Hammond, Louisiana, revoked within her window period but was ignored. Like Ms. Butler, Ms. Meadowlark also intends to challenge the validity of the Frito-Lay precedent.

National Right to Work Foundation staff attorneys have long argued on behalf of employees that Frito-Lay is inconsistent with the text of federal law, as the Labor Management Relations Act clearly declares that workers may revoke their dues checkoffs any time “beyond the termination date” of a union contract. In 2019, then NLRB General Counsel Peter Robb issued a memo notifying NLRB Regional Officers to bring cases seeking to overturn the controversial precedent.

“It’s outrageous that for nearly 50 years the NLRB’s outrageous Frito-Lay decision has continued to grant union bosses the privilege to keep siphoning dues out of the pockets of dissenting workers, even when the underlying ‘justification’ for the dues payments no longer exists,” commented National Right to Work Foundation President Mark Mix. “The new NLRB majority should finish the job started during the last Trump administration and overturn Frito-Lay to ensure that no worker can be trapped into funding a union against their will when there is not even a valid contract in effect between a union and employer.”

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.