Martin Levitt – who gave up his 20-year career as an anti-union consultant to write a historical memoir, Confessions of a Union Buster, in the early 1990s – famously said that breaking up unions is a ‘dirty business’ that is’ populated by bullies and built on fraud. A campaign against a union is an assault on individuals and a war against the truth. The only way to break a union is to lie, twist, manipulate, threaten and always attack. Amazon’s ongoing anti-union campaign in Bessemer, Alabama, in which 5,800 employees vote by mail or want to join the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store (RWDSU) union, provides a clear illustration of Levitt’s statement.
After avoiding one of the country’s largest and most expensive law firms for trade unions, Morgan Lewis, Amazon is pay now almost $ 10,000 per day plus expenses to three anti-union consultants: Russell Brown, Rebecca Smith and Bill Monroe. Among other campaigns, Brown and Smith ran previously controversial, high-profile anti-union drives at Mission Hospital in Asheville, North Carolina. in 2020, on which nurses preparing for the COVID-19 pandemic, to a “Relentless” anti-union campaign; and in 2017, at Kumho Tires in Macon, Georgia, where the National Labor Relations Council found that the company “numerous and terribleIllegal counter-union actions. When Amazon’s anti-union campaign is over, the e-commerce tree will almost certainly be pay millions of dollars to his union avoidance consultants and law firm to prevent Alabama employees from choosing a union.
The PRO law will strengthen anti-union consultants
The relentless, consultant-driven, anti-union campaign at Amazon offers a compelling case that addresses the need for the The protection of the Organization Act (PRO), the most important legislative priority of the labor movement for the Biden administration, what passed by the House of Representatives in February 2020. The PRO Act will almost certainly pass in the House again and President Biden supports it, but in common with most previous efforts to strengthen the country’s labor laws, it is stay a long shot in the Senate. Various provisions of the PRO Act restricts the ability of enterprises to conduct anti-union campaigns without any hindrance: it would prohibit mandatory anti-union meetings of “captive audience”; it would limit the ability of employers to slow down the trade union certification process (thus extending the anti-trade union campaign); and this would require employers and consultants to report their financial arrangement to the Department of Labor, even if the consultants avoid face-to-face contact with employees.
In 2019, while writing for the right wing Competitive Enterprise Institute Contrary to PRO law, Amazon chief consultant Russell Brown has a detailed insight what he does during his anti-union campaigns. Brown’s campaign description accurately reflects his anti – union actions at the Amazon facility in Bessemer. In addition, he shows the main role of anti-union consultants deceive and confuse employees, not, as he claims, to educate and enlighten they.
Fascinating workers
With the adoption of a standard anti-union discussion point, Brown begins by complaining that, by limiting the role of anti-union consultants like him, the PRO Act makes it “more difficult for employees to make an informed decision about trade union take.” He blames unions for ‘wanting to demonize consultants’ by calling them’ union busters’ and making it ‘sound like companies wanting to deny employees freedom by holding meetings to educate workers on union representation, and referring to them as’ prisoners’ for meetings’. complains that under the prohibition of the PRO law on prisoner meetings “consultants who educate employees will be illegal.” Asked what anti-union consultants say to employees, Brown said: ‘the answer is many.”
Brown wrote against state-level bills in Connecticut and Oregon that sought to ban prisoners at union meetings, and call them “an endgame to oust employers inform their employees about what it means to be in a union and how collective bargaining really works. In fact, captivated audience meetings and similar “forced listening sessions” is forbidden in most developed democracies and has been repeatedly criticized by leading human rights organizations, including human rights commission.
Brown says that a ‘typical curriculum’ during an anti-union campaign includes captured meetings on the topics below, strikingly similar to the playbook he uses at Amazon, which is documented on Amazon’s smooth anti-union website, DoItWithoutDues.com. Various press releases name Brown and Smith emphasize similar themes during prisoners ‘audience meetings – so-called workers’ “education sessions” – during the anti-union campaign at Bessemer.
Brown’s first meetings with executives and supervisors come to the fore because, according to U.S. labor law, U.S. labor law “limits very much” what employers can say or do. For decades, consultants have used supervisors and frontline managers to at the forefront of their anti-union campaigns. Brown complains that executives may not say the company “should strike” when the union enters. In fact, the National Labor Relations Act provides employers much greater freedom on Trade unions oppose than labor law in almost any other advanced democracy.
Second, Brown met with bargaining unit employees and discussed ‘strikes and the difficult procedures needed to reaffirm a union’. Anti-union campaigns for consultants always highlight strikes – which have become increasingly rare in the US in recent decades, with only seven major work breaks in 2020 – and the alleged difficulty in getting rid of an unwanted union, although the evidence from the survey indicates that the vast majority of union workers approve their unions. Both themes are also highlighted Amazon’s anti-union website. Further, a majority of workers nationally – the highest level of non-union workers in more than four decades – will choose trade unions if given free and fair choice, while 65 percent of public unions approved, the highest levels in nearly two decades. The biggest problem facing American workers, therefore, is not, as Brown suggests, getting rid of unwanted unions, but an inability to find unions that employees want, but not in the face of intense opposition and weakness. legal protection.
Third, Brown holds captive meetings on collective bargaining, saying employees ‘do not sign the contract’, which is an agreement between management and the union. Consultants tell employees that unions are external “thirdTo pursue their own interests, rather than organizations representing the workers. Amazon’s anti-union website also portrays the union as a “company” that employees “do not know, ”Despite the fact that RWDSU has a long and deep history of representing black workers in the South – mainly black poultry workers in Alabama, among others – and the support of civil rights and causes racial justice.
Fourth, Brown holds captive meetings that occupy unions as ‘top-down organizations’ that have ‘excessive salaries and large expenditures’, although financial union reports are public and readily available via the website of the Department of Labor – as indicated on Amazon’s own anti-union website; and he tells employees that trade unions support political affairs that they “may not agree with it, ”Although conservative organizations have long emphasized that employees cannot accept political contributions. Moreover, no employee in employment law (RTW) like Alabama – which has been an RTW state since 1953 – can ever work. required to pay unions. The anti-union campaign at Bessemer – including Amazon’s anti-union website – has repeatedly stressed that employees will pay unions, although it can never be mandatory.
Fifth, Brown holds prisoner meetings on unions and job security, emphasizing how layoffs on unions are usually done according to seniority – ‘great if you were the longest, bad if not’ – at which point ‘there’s no point in earning a living. In fact, union workers usually enjoy it much greater job security as their non-union counterparts, as reflected in job losses during the COVID-19 pandemic; they also enjoy higher pay and significantly better health and pension benefits, including access to paid sick leave.
Brown concludes that employers ‘know that a union representation election has an important business decision that will have an impact on their businesses forever’. “For that reason,” he reasoned“We believe that it is not only the right of employers to educate the employees, it is their duty.” In recent years, stubborn anti-union advocates have increasingly argued this point – that employers are not just a right to oppose trade union, but a duty to speak out against trade unions and collective bargaining. Amazon apparently agrees with this extreme position.
President Biden condemns Amazon’s anti-unionism
Recently, President Biden a video released what it calls,
Workers in Alabama – and across America – are voting on whether to organize a union in their workplace. This is an extremely important choice – it must be made without intimidation or threat by employers. Every worker must have a free and fair choice to join a trade union.
This statement is very important. Prior to this time, Biden had avoided any direct comment on the Amazon dispute at all times. He has already spoken out strongly in favor of trade unions and collective bargaining, and a White House spokesman recently said: “President Biden has encouraged employers not to run trade union campaigns or interfere with the organization and bargaining.” It is understandable that Biden is reluctant to ‘take sides’ in an ongoing trade union campaign on which his national labor council may finally be asked to decide. But it’s a huge deal that Biden has unequivocally voiced against Amazon’s relentless and insignificant anti – union campaign. It may indeed be the most pro-union statement ever by a sitting president. To find something similar, we really need to go back to the 1930s, when John L. Lewis, president of the newly formed Congress of Industrial Organizations, adopted the slogan: “The President Wants You to Join a Union” to organize the car. and steel industries. The difference is that FDR never actually said it; it was apocryphal, though credible, while Biden actually said it. What a difference an election makes!
Expensive and aggressive corporate anti-union campaigns, such as those of Amazon at Bessemer, are, according to Marty Levitt, built on fraud and run by bullies. The battle between the RWDSU and Amazon at Bessemer is a true “David vs. Goliath” battle. But as in the original biblical story, David sometimes wins.