Eduardo Munoz Alvarez/AP Photo
Amazon Staten Island distribution center union organizer Jason Anthony speaks to the media on April 1, 2022, in Brooklyn, New York.
In the past two weeks, Amazon workers at a Staten Island warehouse and Starbucks baristas in four New York cities and beyond all voted to unionize. While these victories are remarkable and inspiring, there’s still a David-and-Goliath battle going on—and it’s still much too difficult to understand the full forces arrayed against these workers and those at other locations nationwide.
When confronted by workers seeking to unionize, the vast majority of employers hire professional consultants—“persuaders”—to thwart workers’ efforts. These persuaders meet one-on-one with workers, train managers, and hold mandatory anti-union “captive audience” meetings that employees must attend. (Last Thursday, the National Labor Relations Board’s general counsel issued a memo arguing that these meetings violate the law. Until this is litigated, such meetings will likely continue apace, unfortunately.)
Federal law requires disclosure of some details of these employer-persuader arrangements; there’s a searchable government web page, and a user-friendly unofficial version named “Union Buster Alerts.” Recent filings offer a revealing window into the world of anti-union persuasion and the need for better laws and more public awareness.
The federal disclosure forms show that companies spare no expense when it comes to fighting unions. For 2021, Amazon reported spending nearly $4.3 million on anti-union outside consultants, primarily for a different union election, in Bessemer, Alabama, that involved more than 6,100 eligible worker voters—spending around $705 per eligible voter. By way of comparison, Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey spent $6.7 million on her 2018 race in an election with 3.5 million registered voters, which works out to around $1.91 per registered voter. Of course, Amazon spending $4.3 million is like an ordinary person buying a gumball, relative to total income.
And yet the reporting forms are replete with informational black holes. One notoriously aggressive anti-union persuader for Amazon submitted a form stating, “There is no maximum number of hours allocated to this work assignment … There is no written agreement as to a maximum billing amount.”
Are we to believe that Amazon does not have a written agreement about maximum pay for its anti-union consultants? The company still has a written record of the guitar-shaped cake pan I bought in 2010 for our younger son’s music-themed birthday party. But with anti-union consultants, a handshake is good?
And consider, again: “no maximum number of hours allocated to this work assignment” and no maximum billing amount. This is a company whose executive chairman and former CEO Jeff Bezos went into outer space: The form admits that even the sky’s not the limit.
Instead of hemorrhaging money hiring anti-union consultants, companies could figure out how to work effectively with unions.
Companies also incur eye-popping expenses that aren’t ever reported under current law, such as fees for lawyers or persuaders who don’t interact directly with workers. (An Obama-era rule would have changed this, but it was rescinded by the Trump administration.) Companies also don’t have to disclose the staff time of their own managers and executives who are deployed to fight the union. This might be one reason why Starbucks has submitted no federal filings so far; the company may instead be using the law firm Littler Mendelson (“we excel in union avoidance”) to train its own in-house team. One clue about the amounts likely involved: Starbucks’s recently terminated in-house top lawyer, who was paid over $5 million for 2021, will get almost $8 million in severance. That’s a lot of coffee.
The filings also show that some anti-union consultants operate in the shadows. According to Amazon’s 2021 form, the bulk of its expenditures, nearly $3 million, went to the Rayla Group, which is a cipher. Filings by Amazon and the Rayla Group list different names for the group’s head: “Penne Familusi” versus “P. Jackson.” Both seem possibly to refer to a person named Penelope Familusi Jackson, who, like her company, has virtually no online presence (except for a few cheerful retweets about Amanda Gorman, Prince, and more). The Rayla Group filing baldly states, “Not required to report,” listing total 2021 receipts and disbursements at $0. Meanwhile, the Rayla Group’s listed address seems to be a P.O. Box at a UPS store in Troy, Michigan. In short, despite the law, it’s an utter mystery where, how, and on whom millions of Amazon’s union-fighting dollars were actually spent.
The filings also show that anti-union persuaders are outsiders. None of Amazon’s reported 2021 persuaders were from Bessemer. Or Alabama. Or Staten Island. Instead, they hailed from Florida, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Jersey, and even a P.O. Box in Malibu. This matters because persuaders often describe unions as a “third party” that will get between the workers and the employer, which makes no sense because the workers are the union. For their part, however, companies parachute in highly paid persuaders from far-flung corners of the nation and then call the union a third party? That’s called “chutzpah.”
After the Staten Island election, Amazon issued a disappointed statement: “We believe having a direct relationship with the company is best for our employees.” If a direct relationship is what the company wants, they have a strange way of showing it.
Some outfits offer persuaders specifically chosen to look like a company’s workforce. One consultant advertises that it offers “a team of men and women who represent bi-lingual, ethnic and cultural diversity” that will “meet with the individual employees, establishing both rapport and credibility,” and notes that its services will help address situations in which the company’s management and supervisors do “not reflect the racial mix of the workforce.”
Instead of hemorrhaging money hiring anti-union consultants to mimic their workforce’s demographics while spewing tired anti-union tropes, companies could figure out how to work effectively with unions. They could recognize that poor treatment of workers is unsustainable and accept that the tide is turning. They might well discover that a unionized workforce can benefit their business.
Until that happens, we need law reform, aggressive enforcement, and most of all, well-informed workers armed with healthy skepticism and strong solidarity.
The law should prohibit employers from requiring attendance at captive audience meetings. Ideally, courts would adopt the NLRB general counsel’s interpretation that mandatory meetings already violate federal law. In Congress, the Protecting the Right to Organize Act, a proposal for labor law reform, would explicitly prohibit such meetings and more—which is likely why that bill is currently stalled in the Senate. A Connecticut bill on freedom of speech and conscience, while not speaking directly to captive audience meetings, could help by prohibiting retaliation against workers who refuse to attend meetings where employers push their opinion on religious or political matters.
Current federal disclosure law should also be reformed. When well-paid proxies are deployed to convince people not to unionize, those workers have a right to know the specifics. In the context of political elections, the Federal Election Commission has strict rules so that viewers understand who’s funding a message; persuaders should be required to do the same. It could change the dynamic if anti-union consultants had to start each meeting by disclosing how much the company is paying them. Workers who’ve been told raises are impossible might wonder where those buckets of cash came from.
Disclosure law should require prompt employer reporting of persuader arrangements: They’re currently due months after the end of a fiscal year, too late to be useful during the unionization campaign. Greater enforcement of disclosure requirements would also help. The Biden administration appears poised to take action, based on a recent report, as well as Department of Labor plans for a rule to curtail persuader spending with federal funds the company may have received.
Finally, the public needs to be better informed about the union avoidance industry. Workers at Amazon, Starbucks, and everywhere else should be skeptical of one-sided information from high-priced hired guns, and instead focus on their own collective shared interests.
Union density is low, despite historically high support for unions among workers. It’s long been clear that employers have a thumb on the scale when union elections happen. Greater disclosure and more attention will likely reveal that what’s on the scale isn’t typically a thumb. Often, it’s more like a hammer.
