If there’s a signature American business, it might just be union busting. Bosses in this country have long stood out for their violent hatred of labor organizing. Other nations have had strikes, but few others have had labor conflicts escalate to an outright shooting war, or company thugs burning and machine-gunning a union tent encampment filled with women and children. As the robber baron Jay Gould once boasted, “I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half.”
Today, labor-management relations thankfully do not typically involve exchanges of gunfire. Yet they are still extremely acrimonious by European standards. As a rule, union organizing drives here are not met with good-faith negotiation, but all-out resistance. A $1.7 billion industry of attorneys and consultants exists to stamp out attempts by workers to secure their legally protected bargaining rights.
Today, LaborLab, a workers’ rights watchdog, has released some new tools for union organizers and workers to understand these union-busting firms: who they are, what they do, and above all, how much they cost. With their search tool, one can examine union-busting law firms, consultants, and individual attorneys; the companies that have hired them; the unfair labor practices they have committed; and much more. With their cost estimator, one can make a rough guess at how much a typical union-busting drive would cost, depending on the workplace, number of employees, length of campaign, and so on.
They are highly useful tools for union organizers and workers. “We envision worker-organizers, union staffers and labor attorneys using the search tool to identify unions that have previously dealt with a particular anti-union attorney or consultant, learn from their experience and share that information with other workers,” said Bob Funk, executive director of LaborLab, in a statement. And it might even be useful for employers, too.
A $1.7 billion industry of attorneys and consultants exists to stamp out attempts by workers to secure their legally protected bargaining rights.
LaborLab’s tool should not really be necessary, because there is already a law that mandates this kind of disclosure. The Labor Management Reporting and Disclosure Act of 1959 mandates that any expenditure associated with union avoidance campaigns must be disclosed to the secretary of labor every year. “Workers are supposed to have a sense of how much employers are spending on union busting,” said Teke Wiggin, research director at LaborLab.
The problem, as usual in American labor law (a whopping 41.5 percent of employers are charged with violating federal law during union election campaigns), is that employers regularly refuse to obey this provision in a timely fashion and are rarely punished if they don’t. “Fifty-eight percent of employers known to owe reports hadn’t filed six months past the deadline,” said Wiggin. Many consultants or attorneys who do not directly interact with workers are not reported at all, despite the statute’s clear language that “indirect” spending must also be reported. Studies have found that almost no employers file their union-busting disclosures before the election happens—that is, when it would actually be of interest to the workers.
But what employers have eventually reported over the years has provided enough data for LaborLab to build their tool. The most immediately useful part of the suite is the cost estimator. A common argument one hears from union-busters is that dastardly union bosses just want to get their Jimmy Hoffa-esque mitts on worker dues. If organizers can respond by pointing to a credible estimate that employers are spending enormous sums on anti-union propaganda, it naturally raises the question of what they are getting for that money.
The answer, of course, is that unions are provably beneficial for workers and indeed society as a whole. Unionization leads to large increases in wages for members and nonmembers, reduced wage gaps between workers, large increases in benefits, and many broader benefits for the community. Employers, as a rule, would like those resources for themselves—not to mention total control over their business.
Sam Doyle, an advanced registered nurse practitioner, helped lead a union drive at Seattle’s Fred Hutch Cancer Center, and used the LaborLab tools for that work. “The calculator helped us to truly understand (disappointingly) the stunning lengths that FHCC has gone to in order to prevent some of their most valuable/productive/committed employees [advanced registered nurse practitioners and physician assistants] from organizing in a legally protected manner,” he told the Prospect via email. (Alas, the vote was a tie, and the workers are currently waiting on National Labor Relations Board approval for a rematch.)
Another potential use case for the tool, ironically, is for employers. Union-busting campaigns are very costly—LaborLab estimates, for instance, that a monthlong anti-union effort at Fred Hutch cost on the order of $446,000. That could easily be more than a union contract would cost—particularly given the possibility that management might spend all that money and then lose anyway.
Often business owners pay these enormous fees because they have a fervent ideological hatred of unions, but some of them are tricked by high-pressure sale tactics. “Union-busting firms have a very easy customer-acquisition pipeline because they can just watch representation petition filings as they come into the NLRB,” said Matt Bruenig, a labor attorney and president of the People’s Policy Project think tank. “Some union-busters are reasonably professionalized, but there are a lot of little bullshit firms out here doing this with one or two people in them, and they are offering a one-off service to someone who is not going to be a repeat customer. That’s a recipe for scamming.”
Whenever a union election is filed, “employers will be flooded with solicitations,” said Wiggin, with firms often using the same tactics of hysterical fearmongering and exaggeration that they turn on workers.
In my reporting in the Nordics, employers repeatedly told me about the upside of unions for them. An organized workforce has nontrivial benefits for businesses in terms of employment and contract stability, political backing in case of a dispute with the government, and a general good working relationship with one’s workforce. Rather than face that fact, American employers can blow half a million bucks, minimum, on sketchy avoidance campaigns that may not even be successful and are sure to antagonize their workers. If they are to see sense, they will have to be taught.
