Kira Junod didn’t set out to lead a decertification campaign, and after a razor-thin defeat, she’s ready to try again.
It all started as a joke in the locker room. A couple of her coworkers were venting during contract negotiations and half-kidding about what it would take to get rid of the Teamsters union. They came back with papers the next day, so Kira figured she’d help gather signatures. She’d worked at a potato processing plant in American Falls, Idaho, for nine years, so she knew people and could cover some ground.
What she didn’t expect was what she’d hear along the way.
“As I started gathering signatures, I started hearing all these stories,” Kira explained to LRI Consulting Services, Inc. By the time she connected with the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, the campaign had taken on a life of its own. “I hung up and thought, ‘I think I just got a lawyer. What did I do?'”
Mounting Frustration Against The Union
One day while browsing the company’s internal SharePoint, Kira stumbled onto information about a Lamb Weston plant in Twin Falls, Idaho, less than two hours away. That plant is non-union, and the differences were striking.
Those employees receive quarterly and annual bonuses, regular raises, 56 hours of paid sick time, no mandatory overtime, and six weeks of parental leave. In contrast, the American Falls plant has none of these benefits under their Teamsters agreement. Eight days per year cover sick leave, and there are no personal days or bonuses. The most recent contract delivered a flat dollar raise instead of the 3% raise employees expected.
For Kira’s job level, that worked out to about seven cents more per hour than a percentage-based raise would have yielded. Fortunately, Idaho is a Right to Work state, so Kira can avoid paying dues, but she’s still stuck with the terms of the current 3-year contract because in a unionized workplace, only the union can negotiate with the employer on wages.
Yet the parental leave comparison with the non-union plant hit her hardest. When her daughter had an emergency C-section and coded on the operating table, her husband had to return to work three days later.
“That’s not work-life balance,” Kira said. “We have a high turnover rate here because people aren’t happy. If we had the same benefits, people would see what a real work-life balance looks like. We also wouldn’t have scared employees. We wouldn’t have a hostile work environment driven by a union rep who uses intimidation as a strategy.”
From The Locker Room To The Ballot Box
As Kira continued speaking to coworkers, they began echoing the same question: If dues-paying members weren’t seeing real returns on their investment, what exactly was the union delivering?
Kira’s work group, mostly technicians like herself, became the core of the effort, but an early misstep cost them time. The initial signature-gathering used the wrong paperwork format, which meant starting over once Kira connected with legal support and learned the proper process. Some people who had signed the first time were frustrated by being asked again a week later. A handful said no in the second round.
Still, the campaign gathered enough valid signatures to trigger an election, clearing the required 30% threshold with room to spare.
Kira was at the plant constantly, early before work and while on break, pushing to rid her workplace of the Teamsters. Her friends stopped seeing her, but she didn’t care. “I wanted it so bad,” she said.
Later, the election drew an unusually high turnout with nearly the whole workforce voting. The final count: 311 in favor of keeping the union, 291 to remove it. A swing of 10 votes would have changed the outcome.
What Employers Should Understand
Decertification campaigns are driven by workers, and those workers watch everything, including how both sides behave when the stakes are high.
The union’s approach relied heavily on pressure, including home visits, a legal tactic they used to intimidate. When one worker said he didn’t want to discuss the campaign before his shift, he was told, “If you won’t talk about it here, we’ll just go to your house.”
A union steward confronted Kira during her lunch break, shouting that the company and crew were his, and it took two team leaders to intervene. Later, she says, the same steward followed her home, riding her bumper so aggressively that when she braked to exit the highway, he nearly rear-ended her. Then a union officer tried to undermine Kira’s credibility by demanding that the company require her to be drug-tested.
Management took a different approach. As part of a program, supervisors came down to the floor and asked questions instead of issuing ultimatums. They also allowed workers to ask questions on the plant’s SharePoint and learned workers’ names. The contrast wasn’t lost on people sitting on the fence. Workers began to see what Kira’s group had been saying all along: Management wasn’t the enemy.
What You Can’t Control
Fear is a powerful force, and at a plant that had been union for 60 years, some workers had never known anything else. Rumors spread that decertification would mean job losses. Kira walked people through the facts, telling them that a plant that had just opened a line supplying major national restaurant chains wasn’t about to cut its workforce.
Some were persuaded, but others weren’t. Several likely supporters missed the vote for ordinary life reasons, including one who had gone to be with a dying grandfather. “I’m not going to tell someone, ‘Don’t go see your grandfather, go vote,'” Kira said. “That’s not who I am.”
You can run a disciplined campaign, make the case, and still lose ground to things entirely outside your control. Kira understands that, and that’s part of why she’s not done.
She’s Not Giving Up
Under NLRB rules, there’s a waiting period before another petition can be filed, and the workers have slightly over two years left on a 3-year Teamsters contract. But the election result didn’t end the campaign.
For now, Kira’s goal for the next contract window is clear: Get 51% of unit signatures to get rid of the Teamsters, and they won’t even need a vote.
“People were crying after the vote,” Kira said. “It affected more people than I even realized. We have to keep going.”
She would also like to be a resource for other workers who find themselves in a locker room, half-joking about what decertification would require: “If someone wants to know what to do and what not to do, I’m happy to talk.”
Workers who want to reach Kira or learn more about the decertification process can contact her through the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation at nrtw.org.
