20 Mar 2025
12 Mar 2025
7 Apr 2023
10 Mar 2023
26 May 2022

Casino Worker Challenges Order Installing Unwanted Union via ‘Card Check’

LAS VEGAS, NV – A large
majority of the workers at Red Rock
Casino in Las Vegas, Nevada voted
“no” to unionization, but a federal
district court judge ordered their
employer to bargain with union
officials anyway. Casino officials
appealed, and Red Rock employee
Raynell Teske supported their efforts
to overturn the judge’s coercive order
that overrides the choice workers
made at the ballot box.
With free Foundation legal aid,
Teske filed a brief arguing that the
district judge had no reason to
impose a union onto workers who
had already soundly voted to reject
it. A Ninth Circuit panel denied the
initial appeal, but issued an unusual
concurring opinion in which all
three judges said they disagreed with
that outcome, but were bound by
Ninth Circuit precedent to uphold
the district judge’s order.
Binding precedent can only be
overturned through an en banc
hearing before a larger Ninth Circuit
panel. Red Rock lawyers filed for an
en banc rehearing of their appeal.The
court then ordered National Labor
Relations Board (NLRB) lawyers
defending the order to respond,
another signal the judges may be
willing to overturn this ridiculous
precedent and rule in the workers’
favor. Teske filed a second amicus
brief, urging the court to hear the
case en banc.
Judge Overrides Workers’
Vote Against Union
‘Representation’
The situation at Red Rock began in
December 2019, when the NLRB held
a secret-ballot election on whether
to unionize the Casino’s workers.
Employees rejected union officials’
effort to become their monopoly
bargaining “representatives” in an
NLRB-supervised vote by a nearly
100-vote margin. Despite that
outcome, NLRB Region 28 Director
Cornele Overstreet sought a federal
court injunction imposing the union
over the workers’ objections.
On July 20, 2021, District Judge
Gloria Navarro agreed with the
NLRB Director’s request, and
ordered Red Rock to bargain with
union officials despite the employees’
vote against unionization. The judge
said the order was justified because
union officials claimed that, before
the vote, a majority of workers had
signed union authorization cards.
Teske’s amicus briefs argue those
“Card Check” signatures don’t prove
that union officials ever had majority
support. She contends the level of
union support was tested fairly by
the secret-ballot election, in which
workers voted 627-534 against
unionization.
Her briefs point out that the
NLRB and federal courts have long
recognized that secret ballots are a
more reliable way of gauging worker
support for a union, because workers
are often pressured, harassed, or
misled by union organizers into
signing cards.
Unions officials know that Card
Check signatures do not indicate
solid worker support. The AFL-CIO
admitted in its internal organizing
handbook that it needed at least 75%
Card Check support before having
even a 50-50 chance of winning a
secret-ballot election. Union bosses
prefer Card Check unionization
because they can more easily take
control of workplaces where they
lack popular support, and partisan
NLRB appointees now are working
to grant their wish.
Partisan NLRB Pushes
Unreliable ‘Card Check’
Past legislative attempts to enact
Card Check unionization, including
the so-called “PRO Act,” pending
in the U.S. Senate right now, faced
bipartisan opposition. However,
NLRB General Counsel Jennifer
Abruzzo, a former high-ranking
union lawyer, believes she can
implement Card Check without
congressional approval. Abruzzo has
expressed interest in resurrecting
a decades-old NLRB doctrine that
allows unions to sue employers to
try to force them to automatically
bargain whenever the union
possesses a pile of untested union
cards.
“There is no reason why district
court judges or NLRB bureaucrats
should be able to override workers’
choice at the ballot box,” said
National Right to Work Foundation
Vice President Patrick Semmens. “A
favorable ruling for Raynell Teske
and her colleagues could provide
legal ammunition for future workers
if the NLRB tries to force them to
accept union officials for whom they
never even had a chance to vote.”

9 May 2022
2 Dec 2021

Foundation Assists Workers in Kicking Out Unwanted Union Bosses

Disculpa, pero esta entrada está disponible sólo en English.

24 Aug 2021
9 Sep 2019

Labor Day Media Round Up: National Right to Work Commentaries Highlight Injustices of Forced Unionism

Posted in Blog

On Labor Day, the National Right to Work Foundation generated significant coverage in both national and local media outlets, especially on newspaper opinion pages. Foundation President Mark Mix wrote a number of pieces for outlets around the country highlighting the injustices of compulsory unionism and what can be done to protect workers freedom.

Mix wrote for USA Today that no American should be forced to pay union dues just to get or keep a job and highlighted the prevalence of compulsory unionism despite Right to Work laws gaining ground:

Twenty-seven states have now enacted and implemented right-to-work laws, with five joining in the last eight years.

And on June 27 of last year, the U.S Supreme Court handed down one of the most significant employee rights legal victories in the history of the right-to-work movement with the Janus decision, which ended the forced payment of union dues or fees for millions of government workers nationwide.

Unfortunately, there are more private sector American workers in the 23 non-right-to-work states and others in the railway and airline industries who still work under compulsory unionism.

Mix also wrote a column for the Detroit News arguing that no worker should ever have to fear union violence just because they disagree with union tactics or thuggish strong-arming:

Violence, the threat of violence and the wrongful non-violent use of fear and intimidation by union thugs should be illegal. No exceptions.

The spreading UAW corruption scandal shows that union bosses often act as though they are above the law.

For the Lexington Herald-Leader, Mix wrote about how Kentucky’s Right to Work law benefits the state, and why they need to protect it from the attacks of Democrat and gubernatorial candidate Attorney General Andy Beshear, who wants to give power back to union bosses should he be elected to replace Governor Matt Bevin a friend of Right to Work:

Beshear wants to return the Commonwealth of Kentucky to the days of workers being forced to hand over a portion of their hard-earned paychecks to the union boss elites to get or keep a job. Meanwhile, the Bevin Administration has spearheaded record economic growth after passing Right to Work here in Kentucky.

Even putting that enormous economic growth aside, the fact is that one candidate favors allowing Big Labor to extract money from workers’ paychecks, and the other candidate has worked tirelessly to protect Kentucky workers’ right to hold onto their paychecks without union boss interference.

And for the Las Vegas Review-Journal, Mark wrote how Right to Work laws have benefitted Nevada’s workers and families for more than half a century, causing noticeable effects for the state’s economy:

There is a reason Tesla’s Gigafactory is located in Nevada and not California. A nationwide 2017 survey of business leaders conducted by Chief Executive magazine found that, by a 2-to-1 margin, CEOs prefer adding jobs in right-to-work states over other states.

Business owners correctly view states that have passed right-to-work laws as being more welcoming and business-friendly than high-tax, forced-dues states such as California. That is why federal Bureau of Labor Statistics data show that from 2013-18, factory employment growth in Nevada was more than three times greater than in Western forced-union states such as Colorado, Oregon and Montana.

Just a few days after Labor Day, the Daily Caller published a timely op-ed from Mix regarding the Trump Administration’s rules to make it harder for union officials, like those implicated in the unfolding UAW scandal, to spend worker’s money on themselves or fuel their corruption:

At the end of May, the Trump Labor Department unveiled a rule that, as a contemporaneous news account filed by the Law360 legal news service explained, imposes “financial disclosure requirements for certain trusts that unions set up, scrutiny the agency says will ‘deter fraud and corruption.”
The proposed rule would reestablish the Form T-1, which until it was scuttled by union-label Obama administration bureaucrats in 2010 blocked officers of unions with $250,000 or more in annual revenue from using trusts supposedly created to benefit rank-and-file members to circumvent the federal reporting requirements for such unions that Congress instituted in the Labor-Management Reporting and Disclosure Act.

In addition, Mix wrote two op-eds, one for Right to Work states and the other for non-Right to Work states, which were sent out across the country and printed in local newspapers. They highlight the benefits of Right to Work laws and the problems that forced unionism causes.

21 Feb 2017