Workers at frozen food company Lamb Weston in Twin Falls, Idaho, say the company has hired a union-busting firm to intimidate them out of joining the International Brotherhood of Teamsters.  Employees reached out to the union with concerns over wages, scheduling and health and safety issues.  An election is scheduled for mid-July.  The company currently employs over 400 workers at the plant, many of them Latino or Russian immigrants.

Darel Hardenbrook, Director of Representation for Teamsters Local 483, says the intimidation and coercion is primarily targeted at immigrant workers:

Darel Hardenbrook: “…in violation of the National Labor Relations Act, bringing them into a supervisor’s office alone, with a management person, with these individuals one at a time, and they told these people that, if they voted to join the union, then there was a good chance the company would close…they would just close the doors in Twin Falls.  The focus was to scare these individuals into thinking that they were doing something dirty or wrong or that they actually could close the plant if they voted ‘yes’ for the union.”

Workers were allegedly also told that their health care and future raises would be at risk if they voted to join the union.  Hardenbrook says that these threats to close the plant if workers vote to unionize constitute an unfair labor practice, but they’re going to challenge it with a new and different tactic rooted in the state’s own anti-union Right-to-Work legislation:

Darel Hardenbrook: “Ironically, title 44 of the Idaho State Statute, the Right-to-work Statute, contains in it a provision for criminal charges to be placed against a union or a company for coercing, intimidating or harassing someone to either join or not-join a union.  So rather than waiting the six months to two years for an NLRB claim, Unfair Labor Practice, to be heard, if at all, we’re going to go try something that’s never been tried in the State of Idaho before, and that’s to put the right to work statute to work for the union.”