Corporations Now Widely Using Wal-Mart Tactics, New Report on Unionbusting Finds

By Art Levine, Huffington Post. Posted May 20, 2009.

But even companies that once had decent relations with workers and accepted unions are turning to bare-knuckle tactics. In the report, "No Holds Barred: The Intensification of Employer Opposition to Organizing," it also looks at companies such as the Kentucky bakery plant Earthgrains (now owned by the Sara Lee corporation). The report says:

What distinguishes the current organizing climate from previous decades of employer opposition to unions? The primary difference is that the most intense and aggressive anti-union campaign strategies, the kind previously found only at employers like Wal-Mart, are no longer reserved for a select coterie of extreme anti-union employers. In examining NLRB documents we discovered dozens of employers similar to Earthgrains--companies with a history of maintaining a stable collective bargaining relationship with the majority of their workforce--making a dramatic shift in how they respond to union organizing efforts.

When faced with an organizing campaign in its London, Kentucky plant in the summer of 2000, Earthgrains unleashed a relentless campaign of threats, interrogations, surveillance, harassment, and intimidation against the union.

The charges against Earthgrains included videotaping workers as they spoke to union representatives; maintaining and showing to workers a list that supposedly revealed how other workers were going to vote; interrogating workers about whether they or their co-workers supported a union; threatening to fire workers for union activity; managers forcibly removing union literature from the hands of employees while they were on break; threatening to eliminate entire shifts, take away retirement plans, or gain-sharing benefits if the union won in the plant; telling the workers the union would go on strike as soon as the election was won; and promising improvements in benefits and a committee to resolve grievances if the union lost

Ultimately, even a conservative NLRB threw out the election as tained by illegal intimidation by Earthgrains, and a new election was held, which the bakery and confectionery union won.

Bronfenbrenner notes why such rampant employer lawbreaking was made possible: "They can act with impunity and get away with it. In today's political climate, there's no penalty for it."

Unionbusting thuggery and intimidation is the rule in corporate relations with workers seeking to form unions. And now Big Business interests want to bring the same fear-mongering they've used so successfully in the workplace to intimidate moderates in the United States, some of whom who have been cowed by an aggressive PR and lobbying blitz. Like workers fearful for their jobs, they apparently fear they could lose their seats if business uses its clout to defeat them at the polls. But grass-roots organizing by unions is working to counter such tactics.

As the AFL-CIO Now blog reports:

As the Employee Free Choice Act gets closer to reality, the anti-worker disinformation campaign grows louder with corporate front groups throwing everything they have against workers. Across the country, union members and their allies are pushing back and letting the corporate titans know they won't back down when it comes to the freedom to form unions.

In Wisconsin, union members converged in Milwaukee to protest an appearance by Karl Rove, the former Bush administration political enforcer who is traveling the country telling corporate executives to fight the Employee Free Choice Act. And in Florida, union members gathered in Jacksonville outside a meeting of an anti-union corporate group, the "Center for a Union-Free Workplace Environment," to protest their opposition to workers' freedom to bargain for a better life.

The Bronfenbrenner report concludes by underlining what's really at stake in this fight:

"Unless serious labor law reform with real penalties is enacted, only a fraction of the workers who seek representation under the National Labor Relations Act will be successful. If recent trends continue, then there will no longer be a functioning legal mechanism to effectively protect the right of private-sector workers to organize and collectively bargain."

See more stories tagged with: wal-mart, chamber of commerce, employee free choice act, afl-cio, arlen specter, business news, kate bronfenbrenner

Art Levine is a contributing editor of The Washington Monthly, and a former Fellow with the Progressive Policy Insititute. He has also written for Mother Jones, The American Prospect, The New Republic, The Atlantic, Slate, Salon and numerous other publications. He is the author of 2005's PPI report, Parity-Plus: A Third Way Approach to Fix America's Mental Health System, and is currently researching a book on mental health issues. Levine also posts commentary at Art Levine Confidential.

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