Workers Voted on Decertifying Unions 1,600 Times in the Past Decade. Teamsters Are the Most Common Target.

Like hundreds of her coworkers, Kira Junod never voted to join the Teamsters.

The massive Lamb Weston plant in American Falls, Idaho, where Junod works, is one of the world’s largest suppliers of frozen french fries and other potato products. The employees there voted decades ago to unionize. Now, even with Idaho’s right-to-work laws that allow workers to opt out of paying dues, the local Teamsters union was the only entity allowed to negotiate with management on behalf of Junod and her colleagues.

When you got a job at Lamb Weston, you were subject to the union contract. That’s just how it was.

“There’s a lot of people that have been there 30, 40 years that are set in their ways and they’re union,” says Junod. “And I’m like, ‘Why are you in the union?’ And they’re like, ‘I don’t know.'”

Junod and some of her coworkers began to question that arrangement when they discovered the benefits offered to workers at the nonunion Lamb Weston plant in Twin Falls, a few hours away. Those included more paid sick leave, higher differentials for overnight and weekend shifts, and quarterly bonuses for meeting quotas.

“That’s free money, even if it’s 20 bucks every quarter,” she says. “Why wouldn’t I want that?”

Standing in the way: the local Teamsters union.

When workers band together to demand union representation at an Amazon warehouse or at Starbucks, it gets front-page media coverage and provides fodder for think pieces about the class struggle between labor and capital. When the story is workers rising up against a union that has failed to deliver on the promise of better working conditions through solidarity, it tends not to draw as much attention.

But it happens more often than you might think—though the process is not easy, as Junod would learn.

Dozens of union decertification elections are held in workplaces across America every year, according to data collected by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). The Teamsters are often the target.

Of the 1,620 decertification elections that the NLRB tracked between 2016 and 2025, more than 23 percent sought to end Teamsters representation. The 373 decertification petitions targeting the Teamsters during that period were more than twice the number filed against the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), which had the second most.

More than 60 percent of those decertification elections targeting the Teamsters have been successful.

The decertification efforts that do attract media attention usually revolve around the issues that motivated Junod: workers who are unhappy with contracts and benefits offered by the union.

“Poor vacation, poor pay, subpar benefits, no real job protections [and] our contract wages were way below standard for our industry” is how Ray Cotts, a driver at the Keurig Dr Pepper plant in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, described his most recent Teamsters contract to the Oshkosh Northwestern in 2024. That was shortly after three successful decertification elections at the company’s plants in Wisconsin.

The number of decertification elections launched against the Teamsters seem to reflect dissatisfaction among the Teamsters’ rank-and-file members at a time when the union’s leadership has been seeking the spotlight. Union boss Sean O’Brien spoke at the Republican National Convention in 2024 and has tried to cozy up with pro-labor Republicans such as Sen. Josh Hawley (R–Mo.).

They may also reflect a national trend away from unionization, despite a few high-profile organizing efforts at Amazon and the like. About 10 percent of U.S. workers were members of a union in 2025, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That’s down from more than 20 percent in 1983, when the bureau began tracking those figures. In the private sector, fewer than 6 percent of workers were in a union last year.

Decertification efforts, like the one in American Falls, have been happening despite a lack of widespread knowledge that they are even possible—and with few resources available to workers who might want one. The NLRB’s website, for example, offers just a single paragraph explaining what decertification elections are and how they work.

Even that brief description offers an indication of how complicated the process can be. To trigger a decertification election, at least 30 percent of the workforce at a union shop must sign a petition asking for an election. But decertification elections are forbidden within three years of a new collective bargaining agreement being signed, with some limited exceptions.

Groups like the National Right To Work Legal Defense Foundation offer support to workers trying to discard a union, but collecting signatures and, ultimately, winning a decertification election requires a lot of extra work from unhappy employees. Junod and some of her coworkers on “Line 7” at the Lamb Weston plant would show up early and stay late to collect signatures and make the pitch to colleagues who had never even questioned the union before.

They also faced a backlash. Junod says she lost friends over the decertification effort and recalls several instances of intimidation. She was accused of using drugs at the workplace and offered to take a test to prove her innocence. On another occasion, a pro-union coworker followed her home. “He rode my tail all the way into town,” she recalls.

The Teamsters have used other tactics to stop decertification elections. In 2019, a group of school bus drivers who tried to decertify discovered that their bargaining unit had been merged into a national entity with more than 22,000 members across 33 states—so many that it made the 30 percent signature threshold effectively impossible to meet.

When the votes were counted in American Falls, the Teamsters narrowly prevailed by a vote of 311–291.

As she headed home from an overnight shift on Thursday morning, Junod told Reason that she plans to keep pushing for decertification. But she’ll have to wait a while, because a new collective bargaining agreement just went into effect. She remains convinced that workers at the Lamb Weston plant will be treated better if they’re no longer subject to the Teamsters’ contract.

“What was most disappointing is all the stuff that we could have. The benefits and the better work-life balance and all that,” she says. “It was like my word against the union that’s been there for 60 years….It worked, almost.”

If the decertification election data are any indication, she’s far from the only one thinking that way.