A group of over 40 employees of SA Recycling in Canton, Ohio have successfully voted Steelworkers union officials out of power at their facility by a wide margin. SA Recycling worker Leslie Frase spearheaded the effort by filing a petition in February in which her coworkers demanded that the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) hold a union decertification election at their workplace. Frase filed the petition with free legal aid from National Right to Work Foundation staff attorneys.
The NLRB is the federal agency responsible for enforcing private sector labor law, a task that includes administering votes to install (or “certify”) and remove (or “decertify”) unions. Frase’s petition contained more than enough signatures from her coworkers to trigger a decertification vote under NLRB rules. In February, the NLRB approved an agreement that set the election date for March 5, and specified that the vote would take place among “[a]ll full-time and regular part-time production and maintenance employees, including truck drivers.” On March 19, the NLRB certified the vote result, making official the Steelworkers union’s ouster.
Ohio lacks Right to Work protections, meaning Steelworkers union officials had the power to force Frase and her coworkers to pay money to the union hierarchy as a condition of keeping their jobs. In contrast, in Right to Work states like Ohio’s neighbors Indiana, Kentucky and West Virginia, union membership and financial support are the voluntary choice of each worker. Now that Frase and her coworkers have voted to decertify the union, Steelworkers union officials have lost their power to impose forced dues contracts on the workers.
“Steelworkers union officials had been in our workplace for quite a while, and did little to improve our working lives. Yet dues money was still coming out of our paychecks to support union activities,” commented Frase. “The fact that we voted the Steelworkers union out by such a wide margin speaks to the fact that employees didn’t think we were getting a good deal. We are very grateful to Foundation attorneys for their assistance.”
The tally of the March 5 vote showed Frase and her fellow SA Recycling workers voting the Steelworkers out 28-12.
Foundation attorneys have noticed a marked increase in worker requests for help in decertifying unpopular unions. NLRB statistics indicate that in 2025 (the last year for which data is available), decertification petition filings are up almost 40 percent from 2020.
“Foundation attorneys were proud to help Ms. Frase and her fellow recycling employees scrap a Steelworkers union they pretty clearly did not want,” commented National Right to Work Foundation president Mark Mix. “However, it’s important to recognize that many employees across the United States have a path to voting out a union that is much more difficult: Many arbitrary Biden-era NLRB rules are still in effect, which give union officials a multitude of ways to stop workers from exercising their right to vote.
Published April 2026