The United Food and Commercial Workers union has just been hit with a racketeering lawsuit from Smithfield Foods, a company fed up with the union’s refusal to let employees take a secret ballot vote on whether they’d like to unionize under the UFCW or not. The lawsuit alleges that UFCW has perpetrated “more than two years of malicious conduct against the company,” all in an attempt to force itself on Smithfield’s employees without a vote by having them submit to a petition-style process instead.

Funny thing is, when it’s acting as an employer, UFCW refuses to acknowledge unions without secret ballot elections. The Center for Union Facts pointed out UFCW’s double standard in an op-ed published last month in both the Long Beach Press-Telegram and the Palm Springs Desert Sun:

[O]n at least five different occasions since 2000, UFCW’s own offices have declined to accept a petition-style organizing drive to unionize its own office staff (union employees are not necessarily union members). Instead, on each of those occasions union executives required their employees to file for an election.