"Fear at Work": the Economic Policy Institute releases a detailed report on anti-union tactics

[Alphabet workers news]

The Economic Policy Institute (EPI), a U.S-based nonprofit thinktank with a 30-year history, released an extended report in late July that overviews the massive power imbalance between employers and employees when workers try to unionize.  The report details two case studies of corporate anti-union tactics, one at Kumho Tire (Macon, Georgia) in 2017, and one at DISH TV offices in Dallas, Texas in 2009.  The full report is 22 pages with another 12 pages of footnotes, but it's worth reading at least the introductory sections prior to the case studies to get a sense of the level of power imbalance. Legislation such as the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) act would help to mitigate the imbalance, however no pro-worker legislation is presently able to pass through the GOP-imposed "Mitch McConnell graveyard" of blocked legislation that McConnell won't allow to come to the Senate floor for a vote.

Some brief extracts from the EPI report appear below.

- Bruce

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Fear at work

An inside account of how employers threaten, intimidate, and harass workers to stop them from exercising their right to collective bargaining

www.epi.org/publication/fear-at-work-how-employers-scare-workers-out-of-unionizing/

PDF: files.epi.org/pdf/202305.pdf

Most American workers want a union in their workplace but very few have it, because the right to organize—supposedly guaranteed by federal law—has been effectively cancelled out by a combination of legal and illegal employer intimidation tactics. This report focuses on the legal tactics—heavy-handed tactics that would be illegal in any election for public office but are regularly deployed by employers under the broken National Labor Relations Board’s union election system...

All of these are legal under current law:

• Forcing employees to attend daily anti-union meetings where pro-union workers have no right to present alternative views and can be fired on the spot if they ask a question.

• Plastering the workplace with anti-union posters, banners, and looping video ads—and denying pro-union employees access to any of these media.

• Instructing managers to tell employees that there’s a good chance they will lose their jobs if they vote to unionize.

• Having supervisors hold multiple one-on-one talks with each of their employees, stressing why it would be bad for them to vote in a union.

• Having managers tell employees that pro-union workers are “the enemy within.”

• Telling supervisors to grill subordinates about their views on unionization, effectively destroying the principle of a secret ballot.

... the standard practice of anti-union employers makes NLRB-supervised elections look more like the discredited customs of rogue regimes abroad than anything we would call American. First, because there is no meaningful enforcement for violating voters’ rights, these rights are often violated. And those rights themselves are limited. There is, for instance, no right of free speech for voters in union elections. There is no equal access to media. Indeed, there is not even equal access to the names and contact information of eligible voters. And there is no protection against economic coercion of voters...

A December 2019 EPI report highlighted the rampant lawlessness that characterizes workplace elections under the NLRB. In 2016–2017:

• Employers were charged with violating workers’ legal rights in 41.5% of all NLRB-supervised union elections.

• Employers were charged with illegally firing workers in at least one-fifth (19.9%) of elections.

• In nearly a third (29.2%) of all elections, employers were charged with illegally coercing, threatening, or retaliating against workers for union support.

• Larger employers are even more likely than others to break the law: in elections involving more than 60 voters, more than half (54.4%) of employers were charged with at least one illegal act...

By this math, illegalities are more than 2,000 times more common in NLRB elections than in elections for the U.S. Congress or president. Such widespread intimidation recalls the worst of authoritarian regimes abroad; but these are the conditions that govern unionization elections in workplaces across the country...