Worker submitted petition in which over half of his colleagues demanded vote to remove union, but so-called ‘contract bar’ kept union in power

Hammond, LA (July 23, 2025) – Coty Hally, an employee of Wayne Sanderson Farms’ poultry facility in Hammond, LA, is asking the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) in Washington, DC, to grant him and his coworkers a chance to vote United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) Local 455 union officials out of their workplace.

Hally is challenging a decision from an NLRB Regional Director that blocked the Wayne Sanderson workers from exercising their right to vote on the basis of the so-called “contract bar,” a non-statutory NLRB policy which immunizes union officials from removal (or “decertification”) efforts for the first three years of a union contract. Hally is receiving free legal aid in his case from National Right to Work Foundation staff attorneys.

Hally’s Request for Review argues the NLRB, the federal agency responsible for adjudicating disputes under federal labor law, should eliminate the “contract bar” entirely. “The contract-bar is a Board created limitation on employee statutory rights to seek an election and determine their own representative,” Hally’s Request for Review says. “It is not found in the text of the National Labor Relations Act [NLRA]…and it conflicts with the Act’s core purpose.”

“UFCW union officials have been dragging their feet and have not been negotiating good contracts for me and my coworkers,” Hally commented. “This union doesn’t represent us, and it’s ridiculous that the UFCW is manipulating this one dated NLRB policy to keep us trapped in the union, even though most of us have expressed interest in voting the union out. My colleagues and I – not union officials – should be deciding whether the union stays or goes.”

‘Contract Bar’ Policy Absent From Labor Statutes, Burdens Employee Free Choice

Hally’s Request for Review notes that he submitted a petition earlier this month in which over 50% of his 550-person unit demanded a vote to oust the UFCW. Normally NLRB rules only require a 30% “showing of interest” in order to trigger a union decertification vote, but even with this stronger support, “Region 15 dismissed Hally’s petition consistent with the Board’s contract-bar doctrine,” the Request for Review says.

In addition to pointing out that the contract bar policy appears nowhere in the NLRA and was instead the invention of biased NLRB decisions, Hally’s Request for Review contends the policy stifles worker freedom. “This bar contradicts the Act’s well-established ‘bedrock principles of employee free choice and majority rule’…because it grants monopoly bargaining status…even in the face of objective evidence proving the union has lost majority support,” the Request for Review says.

On top of that, NLRB decisions interpreting the “contract bar” rule have only made the rule more burdensome on employees’ free choice rights. A particularly egregious example mentioned in Hally’s Request for Review is the fact that even informal and unpublicized documents exchanged between management and union bosses without workers’ knowledge can be sufficient to trigger the “contract bar” and block employees from exercising their right to decertify.

Hally and his coworkers are not the first group of employees to challenge the contract bar policy with Foundation legal assistance. In 2020 through 2021, Foundation attorneys represented Delaware-based Mountaire Farms poultry employee Oscar Cruz Sosa in defending a vote by his coworkers to remove UFCW union officials. UFCW bosses tried to get the ballots thrown out on a contract bar-related technicality. While the NLRB granted UFCW officials’ outrageous request, Cruz Sosa and his colleagues eventually voted 356-80 to remove the UFCW union once the union contract had expired in their workplace.

“If union bosses are truly doing right by the workers they claim to ‘represent,’ they should have no problem letting workers exercise their right to vote on the union’s control,” commented National Right to Work Foundation President Mark Mix. “Unfortunately, union officials hungry for dues and power still enjoy many legal privileges that let them override workers’ will and rights, not the least of which is the pernicious ‘contract bar.’

“If the Trump Administration’s incoming NLRB members are serious about reversing the dysfunctional policies of the Biden Administration, restoring worker freedom, and defending the rights of workers, they will see the injustice in cases like Mr. Hally’s and Mr. Cruz Sosa’s and move to eliminate the ‘contract bar’ right away,” Mix added.

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.