HAMMOND — An employee at a poultry facility in Hammond has asked the National Labor Relations Board to grant him and his workers the chance to vote union officials out of their workplace.

Coty Hally, an employee of Wayne Sanderson Farms, has asked to remove United Food and Commercial Workers Local 455 union officials from the facility, challending a decision from an NLRB Regional Director that blocked Wayne Sanderson workers from exercising their right to vote based on the “contract bar,” a non-statutory NLRB policy which immunizes union officials from removal efforts for the first three years of a union contract.

“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.”

In a statement to the National Right to Work, the legal defense fund representing him, Hally added that UFCW officials have been "dragging their feet and have not been negotiating good contracts."

"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," he continued.

Hally's request says that he submitted a petition early this month with signatures from more than 50% of his 550-person unit demanding a vote to oust the union. Normally, NLRB policy only requires 30%.

“Region 15 dismissed Hally’s petition consistent with the Board’s contract-bar doctrine,” the Request for Review says. “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."