Mark Ward, a certified Ford Motor Company Master Technician, and the other technicians at the Landers-McLarty Ford dealership in Bentonville, Arkansas, dealership only wanted what was fair — a guaranteed hourly rate for the time they spent on the job.

Paid only for doing repairs when customers came into the shop, many of the technicians found themselves at the shop for days at a time, but making little or no money at all.

In 2005, frustrated with this obvious unfairness, the technicians decided to form a union. Thirteen of the 14 technicians at the dealership signed union cards with the International Association of Machinists (IAM) — seeking to improve their lives through collective bargaining.

They wanted respect on the job, and for a group of men dependent on a job to make ends meet and provide for their families, respect meant a guaranteed hourly rate, affordable healthcare, and some measure of retirement security.

Having secured a 94% majority of support for the union, the workers reasoned that it would be appropriate for the employer to voluntarily recognize them as a union—so they approached management at Landers-McLarty as a group and asked for the company to do just that.

However, Landers-McLarty had a different solution—they wanted the technicians to file for an NLRB election, and in the meantime, they refused to let them come back to work.

The technicians spent months on a picket line, walking up and down Sam Walton Boulevard in Bentonville.

Eventually, the NLRB scheduled the election. The original workers, as well as all of the replacement workers that the dealership hired, cast their votes. Many of the ballots were challenged, and the ballot box was impounded by the NLRB.

Not all of the votes the workers cast that day were opened, and to this day the technicians who work at Landers-McLarty do not have a union.