**Butte, MT (April 25, 2007)** \u2013 A local employee of Safeway Inc. (NYSE: SWY) filed federal charges against the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) Local 4 union to protect himself and his coworkers from illegal seizures of forced union dues from their paychecks.<\/p>\n
Gerald Rasmussen, a meatcutter at the Polson Safeway, filed the charges with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) with help from attorneys at the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation. The charges cite that UFCW Local 4 union officials are attempting to enforce a compulsory unionism clause requiring employees to join or pay dues to the union or be fired from their jobs, despite a formal employee election recently stripping them of their forced unionism privileges.<\/p>\n
All 34 Safeway employees participated in the NLRB-supervised deauthorization election \u2013 a secret ballot vote that gives employees the right to eliminate the compulsory dues clause from a monopoly bargaining contract. However, emboldened by the fact the Montana is not yet a Right to Work state, UFCW Local 4 union officials are challenging the election results and continue to claim that Rasmussen and his coworkers must join or pay dues to the union or they could be fired. <\/p>\n
After learning of his right to resign from formal union membership from sources independent of UFCW Local 4, Rasmussen and other employees sent letters to union officials resigning from formal union membership. <\/p>\n
In response, UFCW union officials rejected the employees\u2019 requests and invented their own bogus and illegal rules, claiming that the grocery employees\u2019 letters were unacceptable because they were not notarized, they were not sent by certified mail in separate envelopes, and were not accompanied by copies of the NLRB decisions and Supreme Court rulings. Additionally, union officials never provided any of the legally-mandated financial disclosure statements to the Safeway employees.<\/p>\n