Workers unionizing with the Retail Workers and Wholesale Distribution Union at an Amazon distribution center in Bessemer, Alabama, have been met with a range of tactics to dissuade them from voting for a union, including frequent text messages, paid social media advertisements, and “classes” intended to warn them against unionization.
Amazon, with more than one million employees, has hired the law firm Morgan Lewis and a Koch-backed consulting group called the Center for Independent Employees to hinder the union vote.
“Unions are a pathway to making a job that’s undervalued, more valued [with] a fair and just wage and better working conditions.”
The tactics utilized by Amazon aren’t unusual. In 2017, Boeing took out a Super Bowl ad to combat an employee union effort in Charleston, South Carolina, and the governor of Tennessee led “captive audience” meetings at Volkswagen’s Chattanooga facility in 2019. According to Celine McNicholas, director of government affairs and labor counsel for the Economic Policy Institute, employers illegally fire union organizers in at least a fifth of all union elections.
“This is a worker, or multiple workers, actually losing their job because they express support for the union,” McNicholas says. “When you look at larger employers, all of this sometimes gets worse.”
Hourly waged workers in distribution centers and factories aren’t the only ones to face sophisticated anti-union campaigns. The University of Pittsburgh, a publicly funded, “state related” university, has spent more than two million dollars on the Philadelphia-based law firm, Ballard Spahr, for legal services in their multi-year fight against the United Steelworkers.
United Steelworkers is currently organizing University of Pittsburgh graduate assistants and faculty; graduate assistants narrowly lost an election in April of 2019, but the results were overturned by the Pennsylvania Labor Relations Board due to “unfair practices,” including information disseminated by the university deemed a “substantial departure from the truth[.]”
Kim Garrett, a graduate organizer and third-year doctoral student in the University of Pittsburgh’s Graduate School of Public Health, says the university administration’s campaign escalated as the election approached, totalling fifty emails in the month prior to the election with “various bits of misinformation.”
“We got so many emails in the lead up to the election, and it was really unclear where the emails were coming from,” Garrett says. “For someone [not as involved] in the organizing committee or signed up for our specific email list, these emails [seemed like] they could have come from either side.”
The university also encouraged employees to attend management-run “town halls” to get information about unionization. During one town hall, Garrett says a university administrator implied that the United Steelworkers were mostly men and misogynists, and that they “work in factories” and weren’t appropriate for a university.
But to Garrett, assurances that the administration was responsive to student concerns wasn’t convincing. “They say, ‘just talk to us and we’ll make a decision,’ but they’re the ones holding the power to decide which questions and which issues they address.”
The rise of professional “union avoidance” consultants in the 1970s created an industry that reaps hundreds of millions of dollars annually by convincing workers not to form or join unions. And it works: According to a November 2020 report by the Economic Policy Institute, the use of these tactics has been a major reason for increased difficulty organizing unions, contributing to private sector union density declining from 35.7 percent in 1953 to just 6.2 percent today.
Recent legislative measures seek to curb common tactics, like “captive audience” meetings, and shed light on the money spent on union avoidance. The recently reintroduced Protecting the Right to Organize Act—a labor reform bill backed by a coalition led by the International Union of Painters and Allied Trades—includes the “Persuader Rule,” which forces employers to disclose money spent on union avoidance.
According to Celine McNicholas, measures like the “Persuader Rule” are a start and would “shine a light” on an industry that can “largely operate without any sort of transparency.”
But the future of legislation against “union avoidance” may be modeled after New Mexico, where H.B. 364, an expansive measure signed into law in March 2020, makes it an “unfair labor practice” for public employers to use public funds to dissuade workers from organizing. It’s a rare policy measure that enforces employer neutrality, allowing workers interested in unionization to organize and decide more freely.
According to McNicholas, if the provisions of H.B. 364 work as written, they could go “a long way toward curbing the use of public funds for something that should be against the public policy interest.”
“Unions are a pathway to making a job that’s undervalued, more valued [with] a fair and just wage and better working conditions,” McNicholas says.
To labor advocates, there’s room to explore more efforts like H.B. 364 to expand union rights on the state and local levels.
“Any avenue should be explored by state and local legislatures,” McNicholas says. “This is worth the fight.”