For more than a decade, the Communications Workers of America has been trying to unionize T-Mobile, the U.S. subsidiary of German giant Deutsche Telekom, which is now the third-largest U.S. wireless carrier. The campaign has so far won only two union contracts, covering about 30 of T-Mobile’s roughly 45,000 employees. Now CWA is alleging to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) that T-Mobile has adopted an anti-union tactic that’s been illegal since 1935: creating a company-controlled union to drain support for an independent one.

“It’s a little bit flattering,” says CWA organizer Josh Coleman, a former employee. “We have momentum; the company’s trying to stop it by copying our union.”

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The CWA charge, filed in February and under investigation by the NLRB, says T-Voice is an illegal “company-dominated” labor organization, something Congress banned during the New Deal era. Back then businesses facing unionization efforts frequently responded by setting up their own pseudo-unions to sap support. “The idea was to take the wind out of the sails of employees who wanted a free union: ‘Here, we’ve got a system of representation for you,’ ” says William Gould IV, a Stanford law professor emeritus and chairman of the NLRB under President Clinton. In the decades since, “company union” cases have become rare.