In a two-day election this week, 2,270 Fieldcrest workers voted for the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees (UNITE), and 2,102 voted against.

However, the union and federal election monitors challenged an additional 285 ballots. The government won’t certify the election results and allow UNITE to begin organizing the 5,100 Fieldcrest workers until the challenged ballots are resolved.

Chuck Hansen Jr., CEO of Pillowtex, the corporate owner of Fieldcrest Cannon, said Thursday he believes these challenged ballots eventually will swing the vote against the union.

Hansen also said settling the challenges could take months.

At a press conference Thursday morning in the union’s offices on South Cannon Boulevard, Bruce Raynor, UNITE secretary and treasurer, urged Hansen not to “drag his feet.”

“This doesn’t have to take six months,” Raynor said. “They don’t have to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on lawyers.”

The challenged votes can’t possibly to turn the election, and any attempt by the company to do so would constitute a stall tactic, Raynor maintained.

The union leader also argued that federal labor laws discourage a company from making any operational changes while a union election is under way — so the company would be better off to accept the union victory quickly.

“The company makes any changes in these plants at their own jeopardy,” he said.

About 60 Fieldcrest Cannon workers, union members and union organizers crowded the building and repeatedly broke into pro-union cheers and chants during the press conference.

The employees and union officials offered a bleak view of life inside the plants: workers making less now than they did with the same job 10 years ago and families hurt by drastic shift changes and costly medical insurance.

Raynor also said Pillowtex somehow managed to add a number of ineligible voters to its official list, thereby forcing the union to challenge so many votes.

UNITE challenged 228 votes, the National Labor Relations Board challenged 57 votes and the company challenged none.

Raynor said supervisors, their secretaries, time keepers and other ineligible employees wound up on the voter list.

But Raynor said he’d give Pillowtex the benefit of the doubt and assume these were honest mistakes. He also praised Pillowtex for running an “aggressive” but “very clean” campaign against UNITE.

UNITE and its predecessor lost union votes in 1974, 1985, 1991 and 1997. Federal regulators determined that the company illegally intimidated union supporters in the 1991 and 1997 elections.

Pillowtex bought the company shortly after the 1997 election.

Raynor said Thursday the union would have won the 1991 or 1997 election if former company management had not run a “dirty election.”