Spring Hill Wells Fargo Workers Vote to Remove Union in Secret Ballot Election

Tellers and bankers at the Wells Fargo branch on Commercial Way in Spring Hill voted Monday in a federally administered secret-ballot election on whether to strip the Communications Workers of America of its authority to represent them, the culmination of a campaign led by branch employee Virginia Fenton.

The decertification election, scheduled by the National Labor Relations Board for March 30, covered all full-time and regular part-time tellers, personal bankers, relationship bankers, and premier bankers at the branch located at 4319 Commercial Way. Fenton filed the petition with free legal aid from staff attorneys at the National Right to Work Foundation after gathering more than the required threshold of her coworkers' signatures to trigger the NLRB process.

The union targeted in the vote, Wells Fargo Workers United, is an affiliate of the Communications Workers of America and organized the Spring Hill branch in 2024. Fenton said the two years since have not matched what workers were promised.

"Since the union came into our branch back in 2024, we've come to see how much they overpromised and never delivered," Fenton said. "We are sure that we will manage better without them."

The NLRB, the federal agency charged with enforcing the National Labor Relations Act, administers elections both to install unions and to remove them. A decertification vote requires employees to first submit a petition carrying enough signatures to meet a federal threshold before the agency schedules a formal ballot.

Florida's status as one of 26 states with a Right to Work law means employees at the branch cannot be fired for refusing to pay union dues or fees. That protection, however, does not eliminate a union's monopoly bargaining power, which allows it to negotiate on behalf of all employees in a workplace regardless of their individual wishes. A successful decertification would end that arrangement entirely, removing the CWA's authority to bargain for workers at the Spring Hill location.