Labor Unions

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

Unionization efforts at Starbucks and Amazon get front-page media coverage. But dozens of workplaces discard their unions every year, often with little fanfare.

Eric Boehm | 5.1.2026 10:15 AM

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(Illustration: International Brotherhood of Teamster/Wikimedia Commons/Midjourney/Photka/Dreamstime)

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........

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