The Guardian UK
Tuesday 26 February 2008
British law protects the right of workers to belong to a trade union, but in the US, union-busting is a lucrative business. So should we be worried that aggressive "union-avoidance" consultancies are increasingly at work here? Jon Henley and Ed Pilkington report.
Like many British trades unions, the Transport Salaried Staffs' Association makes a small but regular annual contribution to the Cuba Solidarity Campaign, a reputable organisation that has campaigned for many years against the US trade blockade of Cuba and for the right of the Cuban people to national sovereignty and self-determination.
But for one firm of so-called labour relations consultants hired five years ago by Culina Logistics, a transport firm working for some of the world's leading food and drinks companies, that paltry £80 donation was reason enough, when the union attempted to organise the workforce at one of its warehouses, to stick up a poster declaring, in all seriousness: "Your subscription bankrolls one-party communist states."
To British eyes, the tactic may seem so crass as to be almost laughable (although it worked: the workplace voted against unionisation). But it was an early instance of what appears to be a steadily growing trend for UK companies to hire aggressive, US-style "union busters" to persuade their employees not to join a trade union.
The threat is serious enough for Brendan Barber, the TUC general secretary, and Stewart Acuff, director of organising at the TUC's American equivalent, the American Federation of Labour and Congress of Industrial Organisations (AFL-CIO), to have announced this month that the two organisations were joining forces to "thwart employer efforts on both sides of the Atlantic to demonise trade unions and scare employees from joining up."
Compared to the thriving £2.3bn-a-year anti-union industry in the United States, where up to 80% of corporations faced with a union organising campaign turn to a union-busting consultancy or specialist law firm, the business is still fairly low-key in Britain. Only a handful of companies are known to have thus far availed themselves of the services of the major US firms, which bear names such as the Burke Group, Labour Relations Institute and PTI Labour Research and have shown a mounting interest in the UK market ever since the Blair government's Employment Relations Act came into effect in June 2000, guaranteeing union recognition wherever a majority of employees are in favour.
"The US firms got very excited about this," says John Logan of the London School of Economics, who recently completed a report on the issue for the TUC. "Their marketing line is basically: we've got 60 years of experience in union avoidance under laws like these, and we can help you. To my knowledge, at least one US firm set up here quite soon after the act became law. It proved short-lived, but there's no doubt that several US union busters are now operating in Britain, and their activities are increasing, particularly in workplaces with no prior union recognition whatsoever."
Both the consultancies and the companies that hire them generally want the involvement of the union busters kept secret. In almost every recorded case of union busting in Britain, the union involved was completely oblivious to the fact that an outside consultancy was involved. The very up-front Burke Group (TBG) of Malibu, California, whose website proudly advertises its expertise in "union avoidance consulting, counter-union campaigns, supervisory training, union vulnerability assessments, card signing mitigation, anti-corporate campaigns and more", was reportedly active in eight UK companies between 2001 and 2003, and no one was any the wiser until after the recognition campaign was over.
Companies such as Amazon.co.uk, Honeywell, Calor Gas, T-Mobile and Virgin Atlantic have all made use of TBG's services, according to Logan's study, which cites data obtained from the consultancy's website before it was password-protected. Amicus union officials at another company, GE Caledonian, said they were "blown out of the water" when workers there unexpectedly rejected the union. More recently, the consultancy carried the day at Kettle Chips in Norwich. The workforce at the company, which is owned by the private equity company Lion Capital, includes many immigrants and last year voted by 206 to 93 not to join Britain's biggest union, Unite. (The company insists it has "never been opposed to employees joining Unite or any union of their choice", adding that its employees enjoy a secure salary at least 25% above the minimum wage, a 38-hour week, 25 days' paid holiday a year, 100% sick pay and a non-contributory pension scheme.)
Union busters rarely show their faces on the shop floor, preferring to work through selected company supervisors, who in turn use mailshots, one-on-one meetings with employees, forced-attendance group meetings, anti-union leaflets and videos and, in some cases, discrimination against union organisers and even sackings to get their message across. "The basic message is that unions are poison," says Logan.
"Employees will be repeatedly told that the arrival of a union will inevitably result in conflict, confrontation and strike action, with a consequent loss of earnings, and that collective bargaining can in any case often lead to lower pay. Unions are said to be interested only in raking in members' dues so that a small number of fat-cat union bosses can live the high life. Other common arguments are that unionisation is futile, and could well lead to the company losing competitiveness - and so, perhaps, to a decision to relocate, at the cost of jobs. And there's a lot of extreme anti-union rhetoric, particularly in the States, with employers constantly being told they are 'at war' and 'under attack' from trades unions."
Stewart Acuff of the AFL-CIO has watched with horror as techniques originally pioneered in the south of the United States have begun to proliferate in Europe and around the globe. "It's become an American export - the most shameful American export," he says. "We talk about freedom all the time in this country, and yet our workers are deprived the most basic freedom - the freedom to organise themselves."
Union busting took off as a feature of the American business landscape in the late 70s and early 80s, according to Acuff. Under US labour law, any group of workers is entitled to hold an election to form a union if at least a third of the workers is interested in so doing. The first thing an employer will do when they hear that such an election is pending is pick up the phone to one of the union-busting consultancies, paying, in the case of larger firms, hundreds of thousands of dollars for the privilege.
Labour Relations Institute is typical of one of the larger firms. It does not call itself a union buster, preferring the phrase "union avoidance consultancy". LRI is 25 years old and in that time reckons to have helped shoot down more than 5,000 elections to allow workers to organise. How does it do it? The company says it deploys a "nearly unbeatable combination" of media to nudge workers into the no camp. "Our goal is not only to help you turn back the union, but to be sure you do so legally and permanently," it says.
It publishes a book called Total Victory! - 478 pages of advice to union breakers gleaned from "thousands of victorious management campaigns". It produces a stack of campaign literature every bit as professional as the literature pouring out of the Barack Obama for President campaign. When LRI is put on to a union election, it will ply workers with bumper stickers with a huge red tick to the no box, lollipops on a stick printed with the refrain "Unions suck", bags of "Union free" popcorn, and sponges that say "Don't get soaked for union dues - vote no!"
There are also videos with a long and lurid history of evil union ways, and cartoon postcards showing a drawing of a big fat cat, a lighted cigar in its mouth and its paw pointing directly out at you. "This is your union," reads the caption.
None of this appears to be particularly sophisticated. But then none of it needs to be, says Mary Beth Maxwell, head of the charity American Rights at Work. "It doesn't take much to intimidate people and make them afraid. If the guy who signs your pay cheque or allows you sick cover for your kids is breathing down your neck, then it's not that difficult."
LRI charges $375 (£190) an hour for the "outreach work" of its consultants. The service it is most proud of is the "guaranteed winner package" - you don't win, you don't pay. In other words, if the election goes ahead and workers vote to approve a union, then the entire cost of the "union avoidance campaign" is refunded to the employer. But that rarely, if ever happens. In the past two years, LRI has not lost a single vote.
Tim Hunt is one of LRI's 60 consultants. Like the firm he works for, he prefers to avoid the term union buster, referring to himself as a case manager, consultant, or with the rather Orwellian word "persuader". When asked to explain how LRI manages to be so successful in squashing moves to unionise groups of workers, he says it is a process of "education" in which consultants present the "true facts" about how unions operate. "The bottom line is that unions are after people's union dues. When we tell people the truth about the unions, and what they are after, they quickly come round."
Hunt describes some of the tools that consultants have at their disposal. They have a huge news clippings service which allows them to give workers handouts of newspaper articles focusing on strikes called by the particular union involved or cases of corruption within that union. LRI consultants then pass around what they call "strike computers" - paper calculators that allow a worker to assess how much money they would lose from their monthly pay packet should they be called out to strike.
Tactfully, because it is illegal to poll workers to find out which way they are leaning, the consultants will then begin to analyse individual employees, secretly classifying them with a number from 1 to denote pro-union to 5 to denote resistant to unionisation. That will be used as the basis, Hunt says, for compulsory workplace meetings with managers with each numerical group gathering separately so that workers can be subjected to differing methods of persuasion according to their proclivities.
"If a worker tells one of these meetings, 'I wish we had more vacation time', or, 'I wish our pay and conditions were better', then we reply: 'Great! We can negotiate that!'" Hunt chuckles, then adds: "We never say 'will'. It's always, 'We can negotiate that'," never 'We will ...'"
Hunt's explication of the union-busting technique chimes with academic surveys that have catalogued some of the more commonly used methods. Research by Cornell University shows that in 75% of elections to bring a union into a workplace, workers are subjected to one-on-one sessions with their bosses before the vote is held. In half of the elections, the company threatens to move if workers vote yes.
Strictly speaking, it is illegal under employment law to threaten to relocate, but there is no penalty for employers who do so. Similarly, it is illegal to sack any of the leaders of a union election, but in one in four votes sackings do ensue - equivalent to about 20,000 dismissals a year.
"At the end of the day, it's just intimidation," says Acuff. "The intellectual arguments used by these consultants are easily refutable and practically irrelevant. What works is the intimidation - the threat that you are going to lose your job, or car or house."
Hunt can see that in some of the more extreme cases, particularly of abusive employer practices in the south of the United States, a union may be helpful to workers. He knows as much from personal experience because, paradoxically, before he became a union buster, he worked as a union representative and treasurer in Oklahoma for 11 years. He remembers once coming into contact with workers in a steel plant in the south. "They were treated astonishingly badly. The management had the people so terrified they feared for their lives, and for their families' lives."
Only once, though, has he distanced himself from a job with LRI. It was a textile plant in the Carolinas that was paying extremely low wages and where workers were, in effect, being abused. "I could see the need for a union there to bring in fairer treatment," he says. But Hunt insists he doesn't suffer sleepless nights about his betrayal of the union cause. "For the most part I know what I am doing is best for people and their families. Employers offer better working conditions and wages than unions offer," he says.
Not true, refutes Acuff. His figures suggest that unionised workers earn on average 30% more than their non-unionised brothers and sisters. About 57 million American workers would like to join a union, partly for this reason, but the activities of LRI and other consultancies like it are making this a losing battle.
Each year, more union members are lost through branches closing or job losses than are newly recruited. The total proportion of unionised labour in the workforce is now barely 12.5%, and just 7.5% in the private sector. "An American worker now makes less than he or she did in 1973, adjusted for inflation," Acuff notes.
In Britain, 18-19% of private-sector workers are unionised, while the total in the workforce as a whole stands at around 30%. Logan believes there is a "definite possibility" that a US-style union-busting industry will establish itself firmly here - particularly if British unions make a sustained effort to organise overwhelmingly non-unionised service sectors industries such as the hospitality trade.
A number of factors, though, suggest that the union busters may not have quite such an easy ride here as they have enjoyed in the US, he believes. "To start with, penalties for violations of the UK employment laws are a great deal stiffer than in America. Also, in Britain unions can claim recognition if 50% of the workforce have signed union membership cards, whereas in the States you always have to go through this long, drawn-out workplace voting procedure, which gives the consultancies all the time and scope they need to interfere and manipulate. So the environment may not be quite so propitious."
There is a feeling, too, that for the time being at least, the weight of public opinion in Britain is still set quite firmly against what are still considered devious and underhand methods. In the wake of overwhelmingly negative press coverage of the Kettle Chips campaign, for example, the company felt obliged to hire Hill & Knowlton, a leading PR firm, to improve its image. In the often ferociously anti-union culture that prevails in US management circles, few American companies would ever feel the need to do that. But anti-union activity in this country is almost certainly more widespread than unions realise, Logan believes. "The evidence suggests that British employers are not as tolerant of union activity as people think," he says. "If more British unions attempt to organise in non-union sectors, we will almost certainly see a parallel increase in union-busting activity in Britain. The risk is there."
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