Nearly 60 employees at GPS Painting and Wallcovering in Santa Ana have kicked their trade union to the curb.
It all began when the workers reasoned Painters
and Allied Trades District Council 36 served them poorly by losing work, health and vacation
benefits.
]
Some workers were also forced to miss apprenticeship training to volunteer for union political activities, like manning phone banks for Gov. Jerry Brown's election campaign.
When the GPS employees discovered they did not have to join the union, they sought a secret ballot to vote for decertification. The union caught wind of that and filed a federal complaint alleging the company was really behind the effort.
The National Labor Relations Board requested Council 36 be reinstated, but that just prompted the workers to file a motion to intervene in the case between the union and the company to prove that the company
was not behind their effort.
The union was then removed.
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OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.
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