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The National Labor Relations Board has banned SEIU Local 49 in Portland, Oregon from using card checks to organize building service workers for 6 months. Tom Herriman reports from Seattle:

The order came as part of a settlement Local 49 agreed to in response to unfair labor practice charges stemming from an organizing campaign among 32 janitors working for Somers Building Maintenance which provides janitorial services to Siltronic Inc., a Portland silicon-wafer plant.

Ryan Canney, a Somers worker who was not in the Siltronic bargaining unit had filed a complaint with the NLRB that the union among other things, had used out-dated cards in seeking recognition for the Siltronic janitors.

Canney was backed by the National Right to Work Legal Defense and Education Foundation, an anti-union nonprofit group based in Virginia that has challenged the legality of card-check agreements across the nation.

Shauna Bello, campaign communications director for Local 49 said the NLRB election process is often abused by employers who use firings and threats of plant closings to persuade workers to vote against unions. In card check recognition, workers can join a union by signing a card rather than going through an election process which can take several months to complete.

Bello said SEIU had been targeted by the National Right to Work Committee because of its success in using card check recognition.

[Belloe]: We have drawn the attention of the National Right to Work Foundation which is a blatantly anti-union organization whose mission is to stop organizing efforts by any means possible. They often find ways to fight card check through technicalities like this one.

Bello said the problem in the Siltronic campaign stemmed from a 3-month delay between the workers signing cards and the employer recognizing the union.

But she said the punishment was out of proportion to the violation and that
employers are rarely or never punished for violations.