The National Labor Relations Board announced Tuesday it will allow voting in a union decertification election to continue as it considers whether to apply a union contract doctrine to the election proposed by a Delaware poultry worker.

The board will consider whether about 800 employees at Selbyville-based Mountaire Farms Inc., represented for collective bargaining purposes by employee Oscar Cruz Sosa, are allowed under contract to vote to decertify from the United Food and and Commercial Workers Local 27 union.

The union, represented by attorneys Christopher Ryon and Joel Smith of Kahn, Smith & Collins in Baltimore, argued an election is barred by the board's contract ban. Under that ban, an election involving an existing union contract cannot be held until the contract expires or until three years have passed since it was signed. Ryon and Smith were not immediately available for comment on Friday.

Mark Mix, president of the National Right to Work Foundation, which is providing legal representation for Cruz Sosa, said Friday he doesn't expect the board's decision will be made quickly and that the Mountaire Farms employees' contract with UFCW isn't subject to generally used election restrictions such as the contract bar because it's invalidated by language requiring union dues to be paid immediately, rather than by the end of a 30-day grace period.

Cruz Sosa has also asked the board to use the case to narrow the non-statutory contract bar at the national level, arguing it infringes on employees' right under Section 7 of the National Labor Relations Act to determine if they want to be part of a union or not.

The case was first filed with the board in February. In April, NLRB Region Five Director Sean R. Marshall determined the Mountaire Farms employees would be permitted to vote on whether or not they wanted to continue with their union representation.

Ballots for the election were mailed out at 3 p.m. Tuesday. Just over an hour later, the NLRB announced it would stay the election while it considered the alleged contract bar issue. It was determined that while the ballots would be mailed and collected as planned through mid-July, they are expected to remain in safekeeping, untallied, until the NLRB determines whether the election can be considered valid.

"We believe the election should go forward because these elections are basically capturing a slice in time: these are the views of the employees at this moment," Mix said. "And so the longer this goes on, who knows as the employment changes and the situation changes? We want to make sure that the employees exercise their rights under Section 7."