Chelan County Employees Decertify the Teamsters Union

In October, with Freedom Foundation assistance, juvenile detention supervisors employed by Washington state’s Chelan County successfully navigated the legal process to decertify Teamsters Local 760 as the union representing them in employment matters.

The supervisors were initially unionized by the Teamsters in 2014. Because the union utilized a procedure known as “cross-check,” no secret-ballot election was held to determine whether the employees wanted to be represented by Teamsters. Under cross-check, a union can be certified by the state Public Employment Relations Commission (PERC) by simply collecting signed interest cards from a majority of employees in the group it wants to unionize. Unions have a well-documented history of using this inherently coercive process to their advantage, at workers’ expense.

In the years since 2014, however, the juvenile detention supervisors became disenchanted with the representation they received from Teamsters 760.

Eric Thornton, who filed the decertification petition, previously served as the volunteer shop steward and worked alongside professional Teamsters staff through several contract negotiations with the county. He didn’t like what he saw.

Thornton describes the Teamsters’ conduct in the collective bargaining negotiations as “angry and forceful,” resulting in many “uncomfortable situations.”

“I felt we received a worse contract from having been unionized,” he explains.

Thornton and his coworkers tried to address the problem by asking Teamsters 760 to assign them a different business agent. While the union promised to do so, it “never followed through,” Thornton noted, prompting the juvenile detention supervisors to cancel their union memberships en masse.

About six months later, Thornton recalled, Teamsters 760 contacted the employees to “apologize for not reaching out and ask us to trust them again, but I told them it was too late for that and decided to move ahead with an effort to decertify the union.”

After attempting to navigate the decertification paperwork on his own, Thornton connected with the Freedom Foundation.

“Their team helped me through the legal process and made sure everything was in order to file our petition,” he said.

Thornton filed the decertification petition with PERC in early October. Rather than proceed with a decertification vote it was sure to lose, Teamsters 760 responded by filing a “disclaimer of interest” with PERC, effectively cutting the employees loose.

PERC certified Thornton and his co-workers as union-free on Oct. 20.

Unfortunately, the poor union experience of the Chelan County juvenile detention supervisors is not unique.

The Freedom Foundation has previously assisted state employees, public school teachers, and municipal employees like police in decertifying unwanted unions or replacing them with new, independent unions more suited to their needs and values.

“We’re truly grateful to the Freedom Foundation for walking us through the process,” said Thornton. “They made it all very simple, and I’d recommend that anyone else interested in decertifying a poor performing union in their workplace get in touch with them.”