Union busting is a range of activities undertaken to disrupt or weaken the power of trade unions or their attempts to grow their membership in a workplace. Some employers use the euphemisms union avoidance and preventative labor relations to refer to union busting.
Union busting tactics can include both legal and illegal activities, and can range anywhere from subtle to violent. Labor laws differ greatly from country to country in respect to their protection of unions and their organizing activities. These laws can affect topics such as posting notices, organizing on or off employer property, solicitations, card signing, union dues, picketing, work stoppages, striking and strikebreaking, lockouts, termination of employment, permanent replacements, automatic recognition, derecognition, ballot elections, and employer-controlled trade unions.*
Article 23 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights declares that everyone has a right to form or join a trade union. The provision is, however, not legally binding and has, in most jurisdictions, no horizontal effect in the legal relation between employer and employees or unions.
The union busting industry consists of consultancies who help employers discourage union efforts. Internationally, compliance with labor laws within developed countries can be vastly different from emerging countries.
History United Kingdom Following the repeal of the Combination Laws in 1824, workers were no longer prohibited from forming labor organizations or collective bargaining, although significant restrictions remained. In 1832 the Friendly Society of Agricultural Labourers was formed in Dorset to challenge declining wages. The members of the organization agreed to only work for wages greater than a certain amount. In 1834 a landlord complained, and key members were charged and convicted under laws prohibiting the swearing of secret oaths. The sentence of seven years penal transportation to Australia prompted a movement to defend the members, known as the Tolpuddle Martyrs (referring to the village where the organization originated), who were eventually released in 1836 and 1837.
Presently, UK labor laws are defined within the Employment Relations Act 1999 (ERA) and the Trade Union and Labour Relations (Consolidation) Act 1992, and give individual workers no constitutional right to strike; groups of workers may legally strike only if they conform to numerous conditions. In the UK and EU, trade union opposition may occur during automatic recognition campaigns and ballot elections. Workers in the UK may have union memberships that they retain job to job, potentially resulting in workers for the same employer having different union memberships. When a union is seeking to gain control of the collective bargaining at a place of employment without a ballot, workers with either individual and/or different union memberships working for that same employer may oppose that union.
Consultation is the process by which management and employees (or their representatives) jointly examine and discuss issues of mutual concern. It involves seeking acceptable solutions to problems through an exchange of views and information. Consultation does not remove the right of managers to manage, but it does impose an obligation that the views of employees be sought and considered before decisions are taken. The Advisory, Conciliation and Arbitration Service (ACAS), is the UK government's independent agency for advice and conciliation. Although the Trades Union Congress (TUC) and their member unions oppose the use of consultancies during recognition campaigns, calling it a union busting tactic, ACAS takes a different stance, "Employee communications and consultation are the lifeblood of any business. which "aims to improve organizations and working life through better employment relations".
Derecognition of a trade union, while legal, may be referred to as union busting by trade unions. Derecognition must be accomplished according to statutory guidelines. Workers may derecognize a union which either no longer has support from its members, or if union membership falls below 50%. Employers may derecognize a union if they no longer employ 21 or more workers. If the Central Arbitration Committee (CAC) accepts an application, and the union in question has either lost support or the membership level falls below 50% of the workers, the CAC can declare that a derecognition ballot be held."
2005 Heathrow union busting One of the most significant cases of mass dismissals in the UK occurred in 2005, involving the termination of over 600 Gate Gourmet workers at Heathrow Airport. Gate Gourmet provides in-flight meals and had been owned by Texas Pacific since 2002. The company had been in talks with the Transport and General Workers' Union (TGWU) over redundancies and changes to overtime pay to try and stem losses when it hired 130 seasonal staff on lower wages than the permanent workers. Seeing this as a threat to their jobs, one shift refused to go back to work. Because this was seen as unofficial strike action, the workers were sacked, reportedly with only three minutes notice. The TUC later reported that the dispute had been engineered by the company to allow it to replace staff with workers on worse contracts.
This mass dismissal was viewed by some as a union busting tactic, and caused a great deal of media scrutiny. The terminations prompted a walkout by British Airways ground staff that paralysed flights and stranded thousands of travellers in the UK. The BBC reported that Andy Cook, Gate Gourmet's director of human resources at the time, said "the company had not been looking to cut the size of the protests, only stop the minority engaged in harassment."
A deal was brokered between Gate Gourmet and the TGWU by the TUC in September 2005.
United States
Union busting in the United States dates at least to the 19th century, when a rapid expansion in factories and manufacturing capabilities caused a migration of workers from agricultural work to the mining, manufacturing and transportation industries. Conditions were often unsafe, women worked for lower wages than men, and child labor was rampant. Because employers and governments did little to address these issues, labor movements in the industrialized world were formed to seek better wages, hours, and working conditions. The clashes between labor and management were often adversarial and were deeply affected by wars, economic conditions, government policies, and court proceedings.
Companies may influence unions through bargaining, labor relations, and by other means, but employer-controlled unions in the United States have been outlawed since the National Labor Relations Act of 1935. The act prohibits supervisors from joining unions as well as prohibiting employers from assisting (as in the event of unions competing in the organization of a company), or dominating any labor organization.John A. Fossum, Labor Relations -- Development, Structure, Process, 1982, page 74. Additionally, the two laws, passed in 1947 and 1959, respectively, were the Taft–Hartley Act and the Landrum–Griffin Act. These statutes guarantee the rights of private employees to form and join unions in order to bargain collectively. The vast majority of states have extended union rights to public employees. The Chamber of Commerce has a long history of anti-union lobbying and union-busting in the United States at the local and federal level.
Nathan Shefferman published The Man in the Middle, a 292-page account of his union busting activities, in 1961. Shefferman described a long list of practices which he viewed as tangential to union avoidance activities but which his detractors have labeled as support operations for these activities. Among these were the administration of opinion surveys, supervisor training, employee roundtables, incentive pay procedures, wage surveys, employee complaint procedures, personnel records, application procedures, job evaluations, and legal services. As part of his union busting strategies, all of these activities were performed with the goal of maintaining complete control of the work force by top management. Shefferman's book not only provided the concepts that animated all future union busting techniques, he also provided language that pro-labor supporters believe mask the intent of the policies.Confessions of a Union Buster, Martin Jay Levitt, 1993, page 38-39.
In 1962 US President John F. Kennedy issued Executive Order 10988, which established the right for public sector employees to form unions with certain limitations regarding collective bargaining and a special caveat making it illegal to strike (later enacted into law as ). In 1981 the public sector union PATCO (Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization) went on strike in violation of Kennedy's executive order. President Reagan exercised his power and fired all the striking members, causing the dissolution of the union. Although the firing was legal, he was criticized by labor organizations for union busting. PATCO reformed to become the National Air Traffic Controllers Association. Anti-union policies varies from state in the US with generally more worker protections in Democratic states when compared to Republican states. President Donald Trump has publicly stated that he is against worker protections and stated his support for union-busting while doing an interview with Elon Musk.
In the US, unlike the UK and several other countries, the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) provides a legally protected right for private sector employees to strike in order to gain better wages, benefits, or working conditions without the threat of termination. However, striking for economic reasons (i.e., protesting workplace conditions or supporting a union's bargaining demands) allows an employer to hire permanent replacements. If hired, the replacement worker can continue in the job, while the striking worker must wait for a vacancy. However, if the strike is due to unfair labor practices, the strikers replaced can demand immediate reinstatement at the end of the strike. If a collective bargaining agreement is in effect, and it contains a "no-strike clause", a strike during the life of the contract could result in the firing of all striking employees, and the dissolution of that union. Although legal, it is viewed by labor organizations as union busting.
Another common tactic is flooding the would be bargaining unit with new workers that are threatened and/or incentivised to avoid discussing the unionisation drive to refuse to sign cards or vote for the union, which can include importing workers with language skills uncommon to the workplace to drive a further wedge between the two sets of employees. Corporate headquarters staff can be assigned to individual units of the business in order to provide significantly increased surveillance of staff with the goal to reduce unionisation efforts and to find sham reasons to write up and fire organisers. These tactics often increase the cost to run the area in question significantly above what the unions would negotiate for but in the long term are viewed as acceptable in order to smash unions and prevent them taking a foothold. In worse case scenarios, entire stores may be closed under the auspices of "safety issues" or "redevelopment" and workers fired or diluted between multiple stores while also serving as a warning to other stores & workers that the company would rather fire them then have to negotiate with a union. In the United States businesses receive little pushback from regulator agencies and when violations are found they are often appealed and eventually dismissed or downplayed by judges, or are insignificantly punishing to prevent the illegal tactics being re-used.
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