http://blog.aflcio.org/2007/04/23/the-ugly-face-of-union-busting/The Ugly Face of Union-Busting
by Tula Connell, Apr 23, 2007
This is a cross post from the Firedoglake blog.
Jen Jason started out in the union movement with an internship at the AFL-CIO Organizing Institute and later put the skills she learned to work for UNITE HERE, a union that represents primarily textile and hotel workers. But in the middle of a union organizing campaign, Jason left to become an anti-union management consultant, working for Cintas, whose workers she ostensibly was organizing. Seems she could make a lot more money—her firm made $225,000 the first year she set it up. And she certainly makes a lot more than the laundry workers at Cintas, who are paid between $7 and $9 an hour.
In the high-paid world of union-busting, Jason is a small fry. The so-called “union avoidance” industry is at minimum, a $4 billion-a-year business. But Jason is the modern face of union-busting. At the turn of the 20th century, union-busting took the form of Pinkertons inciting riots on picket lines so the government would have a reason to bash heads and break up strikes. At the turn of the 21st century, the practice is just as ugly—only much more subtle.
John Logan, a professor in the Industrial Relations Department at the London School of Economics and Political Science, has analyzed this booming U.S. business and found that more and more employers are hiring anti-union consultants with less and less concern about doing so. Logan finds that until the 1970s, union-busting consultants were relatively few—only about 100 firms in the 1960s, compared with more than 10 times that number in the mid-1980s. Further, writes Logan:
Most employers were cautious about hiring consultants and attending union avoidance seminars. In the late 1970s, one consultant recounted that a decade earlier: “Employers used to sneak into
seminars….They were as nervous as whores in church. The posture of major company managers was, ‘Let’s not make the union mad at us during the organizing drive or they’ll take it out at the bargaining table.’ ” That mindset changed dramatically in the 1970s and 1980s…when most employers no longer believed in the inevitability of unionization and shed their inhibitions about recruiting consultants, attending union avoidance seminars, and fighting organizing campaigns.
American Rights at Work, a workers’ advocacy group, describes union-busters this way:
Unionbusters operate under the radar intentionally. They often provide material and instructions behind the scenes while the employer’s management and middle-management/supervisory staff carry out the actual communications with workers. In this way, the unionbuster does not deal directly with employees and, as a result, may avoid having to disclose financial reports about such activity to the U.S. Department of Labor. The unionbuster’s name or firm is not used or referenced in the anti-union materials distributed to employees, further masking the unionbuster’s involvement in orchestrating the anti-organizing campaign. More importantly, the anti-union company is rarely called on to divulge that it hired a unionbuster or reveal the specifics of such expenditures. ithout a paper trail, unionbusters are hard to detect, underreported and not in the public eye.
FULL story at link.
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