When the workers at a trailer manufacturing plant called Trailmobile Trailer in Jonesboro, Arkansas, tried to form a union to protect their jobs and improve their lives through collective bargaining, the management team unwittingly offered up — over the course of 10 years — the most salient example of why the process to form unions in this country is broken.

In 1995, the workers at Trailmobile filed for an NLRB election, and won the right to union representation with Industrial Division of the Communication Workers of America (IUE-CWA). The workers subsequently negotiated a two-year contract with Trailmobile.

However, in 1997 — without the benefit of an NLRB secret ballot election — the employer withdrew recognition of the union as the bargaining agent and refused to renew the contract, based on a claim that they had received a decertification petition signed by employees.

The workers responded by signing authorization cards and filing for a second NLRB election, which they won. A second, two-year contract was agreed to by both sides.

Then, just two years later and before the second contract expired, Trailmobile again withdrew recognition of the union as the bargaining agent without the benefit of an NLRB secret ballot election — by claiming again to have received a petition signed by employees.

Workers signed cards yet again and filed for another NLRB election. This time management pulled out all the stops. In the period leading up to this third NLRB election, the employer threatened to fire workers who leafleted, and installed video surveillance cameras pointed at the parking lot and to the entrance of the facility, where leafleting occurred. Management also threatened workers with discipline for engaging in union activities.

Managers also promised increased wages and benefits to workers for voted against the union.

Ultimately, they suspended eight workers, firing five of them, and punishing three of them with unwanted transfers onto more onerous jobs at the plant. Management then used those disciplinary actions to threaten and intimidate the remaining workers.

Tony Gossett, a welder who had worked at Trailmobile Trailer for eight years, still remembers the day he was fired. "We all came in to work one day like any other day. They called eight of us into the office — all union officers and shop stewards. They nailed me first…hit me with an indefinite suspension — saying I was a terroristic threat."

As part of an elaborate plan to blame union officers and stewards for an incident that never happened, the company accused Tony and the other union supporters of harassing the pregnant wife of one of the company’s supervisors.

The company never bothered to launch an investigation, they simply fired the workers. The NLRB, however, found that the accused workers were together at a union meeting at the time the harassment allegedly took place.

The NLRB also found it to be an open and shut case of management targeting workers in retribution for supporting the union. The NLRB ordered all five workers reinstated and awarded back pay. They also ordered the workers who were transferred back to their original jobs.

All of this illegal activity added up to employer misconduct during the election, so in 2004 the Board overturned the results and ordered a fourth NLRB election.

Yet, even though the Board ruled it, that fourth NLRB election never took place.

Reinstatement never happened for Tony either. "I never stepped back into the factory, after the day they walked me out. I was not even allowed to go in and get my personal belongings," he says.

Shortly after the Board ordered a fourth NLRB election, as well as reinstatement and back pay for the fired workers, Trailmobile filed for bankruptcy.

As a result of the bankruptcy, Trailmobile paid only a fraction of that back pay.

After adding up the small checks the company has sent him once a year for the last three years, Tony figures he received about six or seven percent of what he should have received in back pay. He was fired in 1999, yet he received his final payment just a few weeks ago.

"We were in a battle from day one," says Tony -- but it was a battle with no winners. While the workers voted over and over in NLRB elections to have a union, the employer was able to unravel those elections on the basis of unsubstantiated petitions which were never even verified by a neutral third party, illustrating once and for all that when it comes to the NLRB election system, it’s never a level playing field.