Corporations Now Widely Using Wal-Mart Tactics, New Report on Unionbusting Finds [View All]

http://www.alternet.org/workplace/140167/corporations_now_widely_using_wal-mart_tactics,_new_report_on_unionbusting_finds/

Corporations Now Widely Using Wal-Mart Tactics, New Report on Unionbusting Finds

By Art Levine, Huffington Post. Posted May 20, 2009.

A definitive study of anti-union campaigns finds that corporations are punishing workers seeking to form a union with a wide range of tactics.

A definitive new look at the scope of employer anti-union campaigns by a noted Cornell University labor scholar finds that corporations have ramped up a wide-range of tactics designed to punish and intimidate workers for seeking to form a union. In nearly 60 percent of union election campaigns, employers threaten to close the plant, half of employers threaten workers in one-on-one "sweat sessions," and in a third of the elections, they retaliate by firing workers.

Kate Bronfenbrenner, director of labor education research at the Cornell University School of Industrial and Labor Relations, has studied labor organizing for decades, and now concludes, "There's been a change in the nature of employer campaigns. They've become not just more intense, not just more aggressive, but they switched to a more punitive system: there's no more of this 'let's try the soft stuff and pretend to be nice.'"

In response, the Chamber of Commerce attacked her as too pro-union to be believed, even though she reviewed a random sample of 1,000 National Labor Relations Board elections and all those elections' unfair labor practices documents and decisions, supplemented by in-depth interviews and surveys of organizers involved in over 500 campaigns.

She's also been criticized by business interests for actually interviewing and surveying union organizers and workers for her research. But as Ross Eisenbrey, the vice-president of the Economic Policy Institute, which is releasing her report, observes, "Employer groups don't believe the victims , the workers. Who are you going to believe, the employers?" He adds, "Despite a very difficult burden of proof, unions are winning 45% of allegations."

FULL story at link.