Indiana construction workers trapped in union they don’t want

(The Center Square) – All of the employees of a small construction firm in northwest Indiana have said they no longer want the union representing them. They want out. But they can’t get out.

In February, the regional National Labor Relations Board rejected the petition of employees of Neises Construction Corp. of Crown Point to decertify the union, the Indiana/Kentucky/Ohio Regional Council of Carpenters union (IKORCC), saying Neises is under a consent decree and had an “unfair labor practice” charge for not bargaining in good faith.

The attorney representing the petitioner, construction worker Michael Halkias and his co-workers, says the charges are unproven, and the union is playing games with federal labor rules.

“It points to a fundamental problem in how federal labor law often works,” says Patrick Semmens of the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, “which is that it’s supposed to be about employees’ rights and employees’ wishes but too often it becomes sort of a legal game between union officials and the company and the actual workers sort of got lost in the mix.”

The employees of Neises Construction voted to unionize in 2017, certifying IKORCC, an affiliate of the United Brotherhood of Carpenters, as their official bargaining representative.

Neises Construction is a family-owned company that specializes in concrete work – sidewalks, parking lots, foundations, foundation repair and concrete flooring. The company was founded in 1982 and is now run by Robert and Brian Neises.

At the time the workers unionized, the company didn’t have a lawyer, according to the petition filed by Semmens, and so defaulted on the unfair labor practice charge, and was thus found to have violated the National Labor Relations Act, though there was no finding of any wrongdoing.

In January, Neises employee Michael Halkias filed a petition to decertify the union, along with all of his 8-9 coworkers.

Despite the unanimous desire of the employees to not be represented by the union, Region 13 of the National Labor Relations Board rejected the decertification petition.

“It points to this flaw in the system,” says Semmens. “It’s supposed to be about workers’ rights, but it ends up creating bureaucratic systems that trap workers in unions they oppose.”

The problem, he says, is not really the National Labor Relations Board, or the National Labor Relations Act, which the board is charged with enforcing: It’s that some of the federal regulations the NLRB has promulgated go far beyond what the law actually says, and can give unions power to play politics.

The foundation filed an appeal March 3, asking the full National Labor Relations Board to overturn the rejection of the decertification petition.

In the appeal, Semmens says Region 13 of the National Labor Relations Board, which oversees union elections in Indiana and other states, failed to conduct an independent investigation and to hold a hearing to find out if Neises Construction had remedied its past violation of the law, and had instead allowed the union’s filing of an “unfair labor practice” complaint to block the decertification – calling this an “evil” that the NLRB had recently sought to prevent with new rules governing union elections.

Three of the four current members of the National Labor Relations Board are Trump appointees, while the board is chaired by Lauren McFerran, a Democrat labor lawyer who was previously the senior labor counsel to Sens. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, and Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-Massachusetts. McFerran was named the chair of the NLRB in January by President Joe Biden.

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