UNIONCRAFT
← LEGAL & DISCLAIMERS

WHAT WE ARE.
WHAT WE'RE NOT.

Important limitations on who this site covers, what the law does and doesn't guarantee, and how your data is handled. Read this before acting on anything here.

WHO THE NLRA COVERS (AND WHO IT DOESN'T)

The National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) covers most private-sector employees in the United States. It does NOT cover:

  • Independent contractors: even if you work like an employee, your classification matters. Under the NLRA, IC status turns on the actual working relationship (a common-law test), not just what your paperwork says.
  • Agricultural workers
  • Domestic workers
  • Supervisors with genuine hiring, firing, or direction authority
  • Managers
  • Federal, state, and local government employees (covered by separate laws)
  • Railway and airline employees (covered by the Railway Labor Act)

If you're classified as a freelancer, independent contractor, or "1099 worker," your NLRA protections may be limited or nonexistent, even if you work alongside W-2 employees doing the same job. Get clarity on your classification from a labor attorney before organizing.

SUPERVISORS ARE EXCLUDED FROM THE BARGAINING UNIT

Under the NLRA, supervisors cannot be part of the bargaining unit and cannot vote in a union election. The NLRB defines a supervisor as someone with authority to hire, fire, discipline, assign, or direct workers using independent judgment.

In advertising agencies, this commonly includes: Creative Directors with hiring or firing authority, Account Directors who assign work and evaluate performance, and any manager whose direction involves independent judgment rather than routine instruction.

Misclassifying a supervisor as an eligible voter (or vice versa) can swing an election. Defining your bargaining unit correctly before filing is one of the most strategic decisions in any campaign. Talk to a labor attorney or an experienced organizer before filing.

RIGHT-TO-WORK STATES

The NLRA applies in all 50 states. You can organize, vote, and form a union anywhere in the country.

However, in 26 right-to-work states (including Texas, Florida, Georgia, Tennessee, North Carolina, Arizona, and others), no worker can be required to pay union dues or fees as a condition of employment, even if they benefit from the union contract.

This affects union financial sustainability and sometimes bargaining leverage, but it does not remove your right to organize or form a union.

  • Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Nebraska, Nevada, North Carolina, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, West Virginia, Wisconsin, Wyoming (Michigan repealed its right-to-work law effective February 2024)

WINNING THE ELECTION IS NOT WINNING A CONTRACT

If your union wins a secret ballot election, your employer is legally required to bargain in good faith. This means they must come to the table, exchange proposals, respond to requests for information, and engage seriously in negotiations.

It does NOT mean they are required to agree to anything. Employers can (and frequently do) bargain to impasse without ever reaching a contract. First contracts in newly organized workplaces average about 465 days, and more than half of new units are still without a contract a year after winning. Some campaigns never produce a contract at all.

Go into organizing with clear expectations. The election is a beginning, not an end.

DATA & PRIVACY

The /sign page is a one-click anonymous support counter. No personal data is collected: clicking support records only an anonymous interaction with no identifiers attached. We store no identifiers in the database: a row is just a timestamp. This is not a legal authorization card. Signing here creates no legal obligation and has no formal legal effect on any organizing campaign.

The Report an Issue page (/report) and the corrections box on Sources store exactly four things when you submit: the text you typed, which page you selected, an issue category, and a timestamp. Nothing else. No name, no email, no account, and no IP address recorded by us.

Submissions are write-only: the public database key can insert a report but cannot read any of them back. Reports are read only by the site's maintainers, used only to fix the site, and never published. When a report leads to a fix, the note that appears in the public fix log is written by us; your words are never posted.

Because submissions are fully anonymous, we cannot tell which one is yours after the fact, which also means we cannot find and delete a specific submission on request. So write reports the way this site teaches everything else: no names, no employer, nothing that identifies you.

All of this lives in a secure database with row-level security enabled. We do not sell, share, or distribute any of it. We do not use it for marketing. It is not shared with any union, employer, law firm, or third party.

Like every website, the hosting infrastructure briefly logs connection data we don't control. If you have real reason to worry about being tracked, don't use this site from a work network or a work device.

We use privacy-friendly, cookieless web analytics to count anonymous page views. It sets no cookies, stores no IP addresses, and cannot identify or track you across sites. We see aggregate numbers ("the freelancers page got N visits"), never individuals. If even that bothers you, a standard content blocker stops it and the site works fine.

CONTENT USE & SCRAPING

Share this site. Screenshot it, print it, quote it, link it, send it to your whole Slack. Everything here exists to reach workers, and worker education is exactly the use it's for. A link back helps others find current versions, since labor law moves.

What is not permitted: harvesting this site's content or infrastructure for workplace surveillance, employer counter-organizing intelligence, or any attempt to identify, profile, or track the people who visit or support it. Our robots.txt states the same policy.

There is no user data here to scrape: no accounts, no email lists, no tracking cookies. The support counter stores only anonymous timestamps, and issue reports are write-only text that the public key cannot read back out. That's not an accident; it's the design.

WHY ANONYMOUS?

This site is run by advertising-industry workers. We don't sign it. Retaliation against workers who organize is the entire subject of this site, and we take our own advice.

You should not have to trust us, and you don't: every statistic and legal claim on this site traces to a primary source on the Sources page. Check our receipts, not our names. If a claim doesn't hold up, the citation will show it.

We accept no money from unions, employers, law firms, or anyone else. There is nothing to buy here and no list to join.

And yes, it is built with care. The writing, the design, and the code were all done pro bono by industry people on nights and weekends, the same way everything else here was made. Good craft is not proof of a budget. It is what happens when the people who do this for a living decide to do it for each other.

NO AFFILIATION

UnionCraft is an independent educational resource. We are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or funded by any union, labor federation, employer, law firm, political party, or government agency.

References to specific unions (CWA, OPEIU, WGA, SAG-AFTRA, etc.) are for informational purposes only. We have no relationship with any of them.

Questions about coverage, classification, or your specific situation? Find a labor attorney →

Last updated: August 2026

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