The successful effort to unionize hundreds of Starbucks locations around the country was a feel-good story in 2022. As the new year began, workers at some 335 stores had taken votes and 280 had opted to unionize, an 83.6% win rate that experts say is higher than average among U.S. organizing efforts.
Considering that barely a year ago no company-owned Starbucks had union workers, such an achievement is worth noting. But the shine surrounding these very public victories risks obscuring larger and darker truths about the state of unionizing in the country — and to what lengths employers are going to defeat it.
According to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics, union representation in the U.S. last year sank to its lowest level since comparable statistics started being kept in 1983. That year, the percentage of wage and salary workers who were union members was 20.1. By the end of 2022, the figure had shrunk to 10.1.
How are employers consistently driving down efforts by organizers? Well, about 40% of the time, they’re allegedly breaking labor law to do it. In some cases, they hire firms to do the dirty work for them. As well, there are a number of legal means of profoundly discouraging labor organizing in this country, including calling “captive audience” meetings during work hours to warn employees against unionization.
The numbers suggest that such tactics, though reprehensible, do work — including at Starbucks, which has nearly 9,000 company-owned stores across the country. For all the headlines that successfully organized stores garnered last year, they still account for less than 3% of the company total, as Starbucks has been actively anti-union for decades.
The news is not all grim. Public approval of unions is dramatically on the rise, and the sheer volume of union elections in 2022 was up nearly 50% from the year before, thanks largely to the efforts at Starbucks locations. But organizers still face headwinds, and some of them blow nasty stuff.
At the root of all this is the simple truth that breaking labor law, or trampling on its spirit, rarely lands employers in any real trouble. That’s because many of those violations carry no financial penalty, said Margaret Poydock, a policy analyst and government affairs specialist with the Washington, D.C.-based Economic Policy Institute.
“There’s no real teeth to our existing labor laws,” Poydock told Capital & Main. “That is the reason why employers feel they can do this, and it’s not new. These kinds of tactics to defeat unionization have been in place for a long, long time.”
New data analysis by the EPI expands on that truth. From 2018 through 2022, employers were charged with violating federal law in nearly 40% of union elections — for tactics ranging from “firing to retaliation to changing work terms,” the report’s authors write.
If anything, those numbers vastly understate the extent to which employers try to disrupt organizing activities, said Poydock, one of the authors of the new analysis. (It expands on and updates a seminal EPI report on the topic from 2019 that can be found here.)
The data on federal violations, supplied by the National Labor Relations Board, is strictly confined to what happens in actual union elections. It doesn’t cover all the things management does to suppress worker efforts to get to a vote in the first place.
That busy front end of activity, with companies trying to strangle union organizing before it gains momentum, has yielded a full and richly profitable business of anti-union independent contractors. The EPI estimates that the “union avoidance” industry, through which companies hire outside firms to defeat organizing efforts, is now worth $340 million per year.
“That’s very likely an underestimate of how big the industry really is,” Poydock said. “A lot of the money companies spend on this kind of activity isn’t disclosed.”
Contemporaneous examples aren’t hard to find. Among its many efforts to fend off recent organizing at various locations, Amazon two years ago enlisted the efforts of a Koch-backed anti-union specialist to put down a vote at a plant in Alabama. Two separate elections there subsequently failed; in each case, organizers accused the company of illegal tactics, including firing a pro-union employee and threatening to close the warehouse if workers approved a union. (Those cases are pending.)
The University of Pittsburgh spent more than $2 million on a union avoidance firm over a recent five-year period while fighting graduate assistant and faculty efforts to organize. IKEA enlisted the services of another such firm to put down unionization efforts at a Massachusetts store. Google hired an anti-union consultant a few years ago while “cracking down on employee activism,” as the New York Times put it.
There’s nothing illegal about any of it, unless either the employer or its hired guns break labor law. But even violating the weak-kneed federal rules could be considered cost effective by employers, since they are rarely even forced to pay a fine.
As the EPI’s 2019 report notes, labor law enforcement in the U.S. is notoriously lax. While the National Labor Relations Act guarantees workers the right to organize and bars employers from restraint or coercion, there are no civil penalties or punitive damages attached to most such violations by companies or their anti-union contractors. In many cases, the NLRB will do little more than issue a cease and desist order. And even an employer found to have illegally fired a worker for union activity is only required to pay back wages, with anything the worker made in the meantime (by taking another job to stay afloat during the long NLRB complaint process) deducted from the total.
National labor laws also hold that it’s legal for employers to force workers to attend on-site meetings in which they’re discouraged from joining unions – and it’s legal for employers to ban union organizers from talking to workers at that same job site. Even in California, a bill to make it easier for agricultural workers to vote in union elections almost didn’t make it into law, with Gov. Gavin Newsom finally relenting after heavy pushback from labor unions and some prodding by President Biden.
It’s no mystery what companies fear. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that in 2022, nonunion workers in America made only 85% of what union workers were paid — median weekly earnings of $1,029 vs. $1,216. In a difficult economy, those are the kinds of stark differences in pay that could lead more workers to consider unionization.
It’s clear, though, that employers have plenty of weapons at their disposal, both legal and illegal, to continue battling organizers. Perhaps only congressional involvement can really change that.
The passage of the PRO Act would help. Formally known as the Protecting the Right to Organize Act, the bill would strengthen penalties against employers who violate workers’ rights or retaliate against those who try to organize.
“I’m so sick and tired of companies breaking the law by preventing workers from organizing,” President Biden told Congress during his State of the Union address on Feb. 7. “Pass the PRO Act, because workers have a right to form a union.”
With Republicans having gained control of the House of Representatives during the midterm elections, the future of the legislation is in question. The purpose behind it shouldn’t be. The table continues to be badly tilted toward enabling employers to do their utmost — and, often, their worst — to thwart unionization. The numbers don’t lie: employers are taking full advantage.
