Wells Fargo workers at a branch in Apex, North Carolina, made the rare move to decertify their union election last week, with two other branches moving to do the same.

Employees at branches in Spring Hill, Florida, and Casper, Wyoming, also filed petitions to remove union representation, ultimately resulting in the Communication Workers of America-backed Wells Fargo Workers United walking away from the former branch. A decertification election date in Casper is not yet set.

Decertification efforts in Casper are spearheaded by Wells employee Megan Wright, who engaged the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation on the matter. Wright was not available to speak directly with Banking Dive on the matter. But in a prepared statement shared by the NRWLDF, she said the CWA officials “have not made our workplace better and we are confident we would be better off without them.

“At this point we simply want an election so we can vote to take back our branch,” she said, according to an NRWLDF press release.

The bank, for its part, said it was “pleased [that] employees are able to exercise their voice regarding union representation” and that it’s “committed to maintaining a culture where all employees continue to feel supported, valued and heard.”

Sabrina Perez, Wells Fargo senior premier banker and member of the WFWU bargaining committee, called the decertification push “a disappointing development.”

“The company has been leveling … a pretty aggressive campaign of union-busting for the last several years, and unfortunately, sometimes people succumb to that kind of pressure and manipulation,” Perez said in an interview with Banking Dive.

The decertification interest is “a bump in the road,” she said, vowing to “continue to show workers that representation is the way that we're going to be able to change the scales back in our favor and ensure that we have a fair workplace.”

Perez works at the El Dorado branch in Albuquerque, New Mexico – the first of the bank’s locations to certify a union election in December 2023. More than two dozen locations have followed suit since, but all have yet to ratify a contract.

Union representatives have accused Wells of union-busting several times throughout this process. The bank has denied the accusations. Negotiations are ongoing.

Glenn Taubman, who represented workers at the Spring Hill branch through the NRWLDF, told Banking Dive that workers come to the foundation because “unions come in and make all kinds of promises, and then a year or two goes by and people see that the promises are not particularly kept.”

“We represent employees who have the right under the labor law and the Constitution to choose whether they want to be represented or not,” he said. “Unions have lawyers and companies have lawyers, but independent employees don't necessarily have lawyers, which is why they end up coming to us.”

Taubman said decertification happens, in part, because new employees in lines of work with a fair amount of turnover “don’t necessarily want to be bound by what old employees bought or by what they were sold.”

It’s “marginally common” for unions to walk away from union efforts they expect to lose after they “count the tea leaves,” said Taubman, whose tenure at the foundation spans 42 years. They can avoid a loss on the permanent NLRB record that way, he said.

Decertification, however, is “really uncommon,” according to Todd Vachon, assistant professor in Rutgers University’s department of labor studies and employment relations, who also serves as higher education vice president of AFL-CIO affiliate AFT New Jersey. There are only a few hundred attempts to decertify annually, he said, compared to 3,000 to 4,000 certification elections annually. Most of the time, it’s because workers wish to be represented by a different union than currently represents them, he said.

A spokesperson for NRWLDF countered Vachon, asserting that the foundation’s “direct experience assisting employees in obtaining decertification petitions ... is that these efforts are aimed at removing union representation entirely.”

Vachon called the NRWLDF “actively anti-union,” and said the organization “uses their influence in many ways to try and convince workers not to form unions, and influence state level labor laws and federal labor law to make it harder to unionize or easier to decertify unions.”

The sole ratified union contract within the banking sector is at Beneficial State Bank in California, which ratified its first contract in 2021 and its second contract just last month.

The length of time it’s taking Wells Fargo and union representatives to negotiate a contract at the affected locations and others – two-plus years, in some cases – is “likely a factor” in the decertification efforts, Perez said.

“The company has been trying to do what it can to delay getting a fair first contract,” she said. “That really is a function of the same playbook that the companies always use, right? To delay as much as they can and then to utilize that as a kind of leverage point to manipulate workers.”

A Wells Fargo spokesperson denied that the bank has delayed bargaining, attributing negotiation delays to lack of availability or non-responsiveness from the union.