"Union Avoidance” Consultants are Stepping up Their Game - Time to Fight Back!

Enthusiasm for union organizing is higher than it has been in decades in the United States. A 2022 Gallup poll found that 71% of Americans support organized labor, higher than at any point since 1965.

This enthusiasm presents a huge opportunity for workers to organize our workplaces. But one thing standing in our way is a growing $340 million industry of “union avoidance” consultants. Essential Workers for Democracy believes that unions need to spend at least 30% of their budget on organizing. Because the “union avoidance” firms we’re up against are a serious threat.

“Union avoidance” is simply the modern term for union busting. They use this term because "union busting" conjures images of 19th and early 20th century suppression efforts that often involved physical violence.

Modern laws and sensibilities prevent companies from taking such extreme measures against unionization. But they are able to engage in union busting by more subtle methods.

One of the earliest tactics of this new form of union busting has been to create psychological profiles on employees. According to a 2006 article in the British Journal of Industrial Relations, this practice had somewhat fallen out of favor by the mid-2000s when the article was published.

However, these tactics have come back in a big way. Vice reported in 2021 that IRI Consultants, a firm that has marketed its services by using Essential Workers for Democracy’s efforts as an example of more aggressive union efforts, was doing these psychological profiles on Google employees. The profiles described employees as, among other things, “lazy”, “aloof”, and “money oriented”. Furthermore, a source familiar with IRI said that compiling these profiles is standard practice in the union avoidance industry.

This is only one of the many tactics that these union busting firms use to fight unionization. It's why a strong commitment to organization is one of our four pillars of union democracy. Unions need to commit at least 30% of their budgets to organizing new workers. These investments will provide support to workers who are looking to organize, so that they do not have to take on these big companies and their consultants alone.

Without support, companies will continue to get away with these union busting tactics. And not only will workers be worse off, but the labor movement will suffer too.