The Union Avoidance Industry in the United States
| Author | John Logan |
| Date | 01 December 2006 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8543.2006.00518.x |
| Published date | 01 December 2006 |
British Journal of Industrial Relations
44:4 December 2006 0007– 1080 pp. 651– 675
© Blackwell Publishing Ltd/London School of Economics 2006. Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd,
9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
Blackwell Publishing Ltd.Oxford, UKBJIRBritish Journal of Industrial Relations0007-1080Blackwell Publishing Ltd/London School of Economics 2006December 2006444651675Special
Edition on New Actors in Industrial Relations
The Union Avoidance Industry in the USABritish Journal of Industrial Relations
John Logan is at the Industrial Relations Department, London School of Economics.
The Union Avoidance Industry in
the United States
John Logan
Abstract
This paper analyses the development of the union avoidance industry in the
United States during the past half-century. Focusing on one leading example
from each group, it examines the activities of the four main actors that constitute
that industry: consultants, law firms, industry psychologists and strike manage-
ment firms. Although these firms have experienced a fall in business as unions
have declined in strength and numbers — a development that the union avoid-
ance industry has contributed to — they continue to play an important role in
the US system of industrial relations. Over three-quarters of employers hire
consultants when confronted by organizing campaigns, and large union avoid-
ance firms are increasingly seeking export markets for their expertise.
1. Introduction
Over the past three decades, US employers have waged what
Business Week
has called ‘one of the most successful anti-union wars ever’ with spectacular
results — private-sector union membership now stands at just 7.9 per cent,
its lowest level since the 1920s. But they have not conducted this campaign
alone. They have been assisted by an extensive and sophisticated ‘union
avoidance’ industry, which is now worth several hundred million dollars per
year. Several studies have demonstrated that employers who recruit the ser-
vices of union avoidance experts are more likely to defeat organizing cam-
paigns than those who do not (Kleiner 2001; Lawler 1984, 1990; Peterson
et al
. 1992). And this industry has not only enabled employers to resist
unionization; it has also allowed them to undermine union strength, or
unload existing unions.
For more than two decades, scholars have identified employer hostility as
a significant cause of the ‘slow strangulation of private-sector unions’ in the
United States (Freeman and Medoff 1984; Kochan
et al
. 1986), but they have
652
British Journal of Industrial Relations
© Blackwell Publishing Ltd/London School of Economics 2006.
paid little attention to the techniques through which employer anti-unionism
has been implemented. Nor have they examined the development of a pow-
erful industry, independent from management, dedicated to enabling US
firms to operate union free. The few studies that examine the impact of union
avoidance experts on the outcome of organizing campaigns treat these experts
as a tool of management, rather than as autonomous actors, and fail to
provide a three-dimensional account of the actors themselves. Based on
research in primary and secondary sources,
1
this paper analyses the main
actors that constitute the union avoidance industry. Using one leading exam-
ple of each actor — the consultant firm Burke Group, the law firm Jackson
Lewis, industrial psychologist Charles L. Hughes, and the ‘strike manage-
ment’ firm Vance International (VI) — it illuminates the activities of these
experts and examines the development of the union avoidance industry over
the past half-century. The principal actors in the union avoidance industry
are not, strictly speaking, ‘new’. Strikebreaking firms have operated since the
nineteenth century, industrial psychologists since the early twentieth century,
and union avoidance consultants and law firms since the post-Second World
War years. The tremendous growth in the size, scope and sophistication of
the union avoidance industry since the 1970s, however, is a recent develop-
ment — and one that has contributed significantly to the current crisis of
organized labour in the United States.
In the 1950s, when the union avoidance industry was in its infancy, con-
sultants and others were, in essence, part of the arsenal of employers seek-
ing to remain non-union. Consultants claimed, with some justification, that
they were simply providing the services demanded by a growing number of
firms (Shefferman 1961). By the 1970s and 1980s, in an altogether more
hostile political and economic climate for organized labour (Brudney 2005a;
Dark 1999: 99–11; Farber and Western 2002; Godard 2003), the union
avoidance industry had developed into a multimillion-dollar concern that
profited from promoting adversarial labour–management relations, and
consultants had become important industrial relations actors in their own
right. They were no longer simply responding to employer demands for
their services, but were actively and aggressively creating that demand by
encouraging management to fear the allegedly catastrophic consequences of
unionization — in terms of higher labour costs, reduced profits, and a loss
of control of their organization — and to fight it with all the resources at
their disposal. In the 1950s and 1960s, employers were hiding their anti-
union campaigns behind consultants; within a couple of decades, the situa-
tion reversed, as consultants concealed their increasingly aggressive and
sophisticated activities behind management and supervisors. Several union
avoidance firms operate internationally, but only in the US has this industry
developed into a multimillion-dollar concern that operates throughout the
country and in every sector of the economy. And only in the US do employ-
ers, policy makers and (to a lesser extent) the general public consider the
activities of union avoidance experts a legitimate part of mainstream indus-
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