Hiding work is central to union-busting. Employers have used multiple underhanded and easily glossed over tactics to deter workers from organizing and joining unions. Even though the National Labor Relations Act of 1935 makes union-busting illegal companies still find ways to go around federal and state laws.

Employers regularly use the services of union-busting consultants and agencies. Law firms such as Jackson Lewis, who are known for union-building, to represent corporations in labor disputes, lawsuits, and union related cases. Some of their most valuable clients include Google, Amazon, and multiple universities and colleges. Companies are also known to push “astroturf campaigns”. These campaigns are manufactured movements meant to impersonate grassroot movements. The corporate organizers of these campaigns manipulate and misinform employees who are either ignorant of unions or hold misplaced resentment toward unions to spread the rhetoric of union-busting consultants and agencies to their co-workers. Employers often attempt to intimidate employees with forced one on one meetings where they are subjected to forced consumption of anti-union propaganda spewed by management and union-busting consultants. Companies have been known to make empty promises to convince employees not to organize and often use their union-busting lawyers to delay union elections and contract negotiations in an attempt to create a loss of morale amongst workers. Employers also use social media to union-bust. Corporations monitor the posts of pro-union workers, flag employees who have pro-union posts, suppress posts by reporting them as spam and hiding them from worker eyes, employers or anti-union moles will often crash online chat groups and video calls in order to spy on and intimidate union organizers, and it has also been revealed that employers will send anti-union propaganda through text messages.

There are multiple effective ways to combat employers who attempt to hide work from the union. One way is to speak to fellow workers face to face whether it be in or outside of work. Human interaction is one of the oldest and most effective ways of organizing and spreading awareness. An important tool to use to fight union-busting is utilizing the press. Using news releases and press conferences help gain massive public support against anti-union movements and campaigns. Another tactic is using text messaging to contact co-workers in order to spread information and organize. Finally using online campaigning to expose corporate misformation and propaganda, bring attention to the shady union-busting tactics used by employers, secretly conducting investigations into the underhanded motives of companies, studying up on workers’ rights, keeping track of and documenting violations conducted by employers, and capturing the National Labor Relations Board’s (NLRB) attention and getting them on your side.

As workers we must maintain pride and dignity and recognize that we are the foundations to all corporations around the country and deserving of workers’ rights, especially the right to unionize and organize. Like a hand, its individual fingers are weak and easily broken, but when those fingers come together into a fist its strength cannot be broken and can smash through any obstacle or adversary.

The post Employers Hiding Work from the Union: How to Spot It and What To Do About It first appeared on Labor Today.

The post Employers Hiding Work from the Union: How to Spot It and What To Do About It appeared first on Labor Today.

While former President Biden’s claim to have been “the most pro-union President in history” is certainly debatable, President Trump is on track to become the most anti-union President in history in his second term.

In his first three months in office, Trump has signed executive orders which seek to cancel collective bargaining agreements covering over one million federal workers. Although justified with reference to “national security,” the executive orders target workers across the federal government, in agencies as disparate as Veterans Affairs, the Treasury and Energy Departments, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the Department of Health and Human Services.

The executive orders seek to not only overturn existing union contracts, but strip workers’ right to be represented by a union at all. They also instruct government agencies to stop deducting union dues from members’ paychecks. Since Trump was inaugurated, the largest federal government workers’ union, the American Federation of Government Employees, has seen its membership surge by tens of thousands of members.

As veteran labor reporter Steven Greenhouse pointed out in a recent article in The Guardian, Trump’s “aggressive wave of anti-union actions is already spurring some [private-sector] US employers to take a more hostile stance toward unions.”

Private-sector employers who wish to take advantage of the current moment to attack or weaken their workers’ unions will find it easier to do so since Trump fired National Labor Relations Board member Gwynne Wilcox in January, leaving the Board unable to issue decisions. Following another executive order, the so-called “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) shut down the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service in March.

On April 3, an anti-union trade association asked Attorney General Pam Bondi to “invalidate fifteen NLRB cases that were decided during the Biden administration.” As analyst Matt Bruenig writes at NLRB Edge:

This sort of thing has never happened before. The NLRB is an independent agency and the AG has no statutory role in how it operates. Such a move by the AG would be illegal under prevailing understandings of administrative law, but of course Trump and the conservative legal movement are seeking to have the Supreme Court invalidate a large swath of administrative law on the theory that it unconstitutionally restricts the power of the president.

An even more disturbing and bizarre attack on the ability of the NLRB to protect workers’ rights was revealed earlier this week when a whistleblower from the NLRB’s information technology department revealed to Congress and NPR that operatives from DOGE likely removed around 10 gigabytes of sensitive information from the Board’s case management system.

In addition to obvious concerns about the breach of privacy (NLRB case data includes sensitive personal information such as social security numbers and home addresses, as well as proprietary corporate information), if employers got ahold of this data, it would make it easier for them to fire — and blacklist — active union members.

Of particular concern is that DOGE is headed by billionaire Elon Musk, whose company SpaceX has been the subject of NLRB complaints filed by its workers, and who has shown himself to be rabidly anti-union.

The post Trump Administration Goes on Union-Busting Spree first appeared on Labor Today.

The post Trump Administration Goes on Union-Busting Spree appeared first on Labor Today.

Carey was an NLRB official from 2009-2018, after which she joined notorious union-busting law firm, Morgan Lewis where she made partner in 2024. Morgan Lewis has been a thorn in the side of labor for decades including during the 1981 PATCO strike, currently Morgan Lewis represents Amazon in their fight against the nationwide campaign to organize their sweatshop-like facilities.

We must ask who benefits from an appointment like this. It certainly is neither the labor movement nor the working class as a whole. Trump knows full well that the misleaders of labor have relied heavily on the administrative state to organize and maintain any semblance of power against the assaults for monopoly capital; this is an attempt to pull the rug out from under them.

The only path forward is a mass rank-and-file movement aimed at fighting back against monopoly capital’s new assault. We can only defeat the bosses with a class-oriented trade union movement built from below and ready to fight. We need a militant labor movement to take the lead in building an anti-monopoly coalition to fight the bosses and organize the unorganized.

The post Trump Continues Assault on Labor, Names Union-Busting Lawyer as new NLRB General Counsel first appeared on Labor Today.

The post Trump Continues Assault on Labor, Names Union-Busting Lawyer as new NLRB General Counsel appeared first on Labor Today.