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THE REAL COST OF UNION BUSTING IS MUCH HIGHER THAN YOU THINK  
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Chris Brooks
May 21, 2026
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_ A new study reveals that employers are spending big to maintain
their dictatorial control over the workplace and crush unions. It’s
a daunting amount of money, but it’s not impossible to overcome if
workers can act with clarity, unity, and strategy. _

Formner Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz had a long history of actively
opposing unionization and has frequently been described as an
aggressive opponent of labor unions.,

 

The most militant class warriors in the United States aren’t New
York City nurses, UPS delivery drivers, or Midwestern autoworkers.
They’re employers who are willing to spend big to maintain their
dictatorial control over the workplace in the pursuit of maximizing
profits.

A new study
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by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) and LaborLab estimates that
employers spent about $1.7 billion on union avoidance specialists and
union-busting attorneys in 2024. The jointly authored report is one
the most expansive and thorough estimates of union avoidance costs
performed in decades.

“Seventy percent of Americans support unions, and millions would
join one if they could. The report shows how far employers are willing
to go to keep the deck stacked against workers,” said Bob Funk,
founder and executive director of LaborLab. “Union busting is a
profitable investment, because it provides employers with a xxxxxx
against both workers and public scrutiny.”

Despite taking a far more expansive look at the union-busting
industry, the report acknowledges that it understates what employers
actually spend to suppress organizing. It excludes many internal
costs — such as maintaining union-prevention systems and employee
surveillance operations — as well as major external costs beyond
consultants and anti-union law firms.

Attempts to analyze union busting over the past five decades have
dramatically underestimated costs for a couple of important reasons.
One is imperfect data. Federal disclosure rules require employers to
report spending on union-busting consultants who directly communicate
with workers to discourage unionization. But only about a third of
employers file those reports on time — if they file them at all.
Additionally, many union-busting consultants usually provide “behind
the scenes” services that don’t require disclosure, such as
campaign coordination, supervisor coaching, and communications
preparations.

Another is that the cost is hidden by management. While the Bureau of
Labor Statistics (BLS) measures “days of idleness
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accumulation of days of work lost due to strikes involving one
thousand or more workers, no such measure exists or is reported for
productivity losses during anti-union campaigns, such as the hours
that many workers are forced to spend attending captive audience
meetings. Nor is the value of paid employee and supervisor time spent
in those meetings included.

Additionally, contemporary estimates have not included the costs of
in-house employee and labor relations specialists whose job
descriptions often include active union prevention
activities. Extrapolating from BLS data, LaborLab told Jacobin it
estimates that employers spend roughly $8 billion annually on labor
and employee relations specialists
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another $40 billion on human relations
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managers. According to LaborLab, at least half of spending on labor
and employee relations specialists — and at least 10 percent of
spending on HR management — should be understood as union-avoidance
spending. By that estimate, employers are spending at least $8 billion
annually on internal anti-union infrastructure alone.

“Employee relations specialists are basically in-house
union-busters. There is a revolving door between that occupation and
the union-busting industry,” said Teke Wiggin, LaborLab’s
director of strategic initiatives. “Human resources management,
meanwhile, was created in large part to substitute for and undermine
unions, and it has not stopped serving this function. When anti-union
consultants are hired, it is usually the employee relations specialist
or the HR manager who is doing the hiring, and both are typically
appointed in-house leaders of anti-union campaigns.”

The True Cost Could Be Tens to Hundreds of Billions a Year

In practice, many of the country’s largest corporations are paying
enormous sums to maintain a permanent internal anti-union operation
designed to detect and suppress organizing before it spreads — and
then make calculated interventions once workers are in motion.

“Amazon, Starbucks, and other companies have employee relations
specialists, and one of their specialties is managing what they call
‘labor risk,’” said Wiggin. “These specialists scout out
locations where employee dissatisfaction might turn into organizing
and then are deployed to mitigate the risk. They also manage employee
engagement programs, which are understood to be active surveillance
and management of workers with the explicit purpose of avoiding
unions.”

A 2025 survey
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HR professionals, senior executives, and in-house attorneys by
notorious union-busting law firm Littler Mendelson acknowledges that
nearly half of nonunion employers have rolled out or expanded
“employee engagement” programs specifically to head off
organizing. These initiatives, which range from internal surveys to
structured listening campaigns, typically cost between 1 and
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of total payroll. Given that US wages run into the trillions, even
allocating a small share of that spending toward union avoidance would
push the true cost of employer anti-union activity far beyond what has
been estimated by EPI and LaborLab, potentially into the tens of
billions annually.

And that may still understate the real cost of union avoidance.
Employers also spend enormous sums raising wages and benefits to deter
organizing — as nonunion auto companies did after the United Auto
Workers’ “stand-up strike
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are included, the true price of suppressing unions may run into the
hundreds of billions annually.

The Employer Zone of Freedom

In almost every major strike or scorched-earth union-busting campaign,
workers eventually ask the same question: Wouldn’t it be cheaper for
the boss to just give us what we’re asking for?

I’ve personally negotiated with employers who refused to bargain
jointly across multiple newly organized units at the same company,
insisting instead on separate negotiating tables and contracts for
workers doing identical jobs in different locations. The result would
have been wildly inefficient: different grievance timelines, different
wage rates, different benefit structures inside the same self-funded
insurance plan. This would have resulted in enormous administrative
nightmares and contractual liabilities for these companies, yet it’s
the employers who were demanding it.

What explains this? If corporations are willing to incur billions of
dollars in costs, financial and productivity losses, legal exposure,
and reputational damage rather than recognizing a union or agreeing to
a contract, what exactly are they defending? Are employers simply
prioritizing their authority to control the workplace how they see fit
over profits?

“Employers are not choosing workplace control over the maximization
of profits, but seeking to maintain workplace control as the means for
maximizing profits,” said Vivek Chibber
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at New York University. Employers operate in a world of uncertainty,
he argues, and what they prize most is freedom of action:

What businesses see looking out into the future is enormous
uncertainty, and what they take as the solution to that uncertainty is
full freedom to respond to changes in demand, changes in customer
profiles, and changes in government policies and regulations. The
union is an added risk to their ability to make profits and maintain
position in a highly competitive market, because the union might tie
an employer’s hands in a billion different ways.

 
 
From that vantage point, even a potentially cooperative union is an
encumbrance. “To the employer, incurring short-term costs, even if
they’re heavy, is worth it if it means they can avoid having a union
in the shop,” Chibber explains. “From their perspective, once a
union is allowed into the door, management has to live with it.”

In other words, unions narrow what Chibber calls “management’s
zone of freedom.” They reduce the unilateral discretion that
executives rely on to restructure, discipline, outsource, or pivot
when markets shift. The boss might hand out a raise or fire a widely
hated supervisor during an organizing drive to blunt momentum, but
what they are _not_ surrendering is the power to
decide _whether_ that raise is given or _whether_ that supervisor
stays or goes. Still, that power is only a means to an end. The
authoritarianism of the workplace is secondary to the drive for
profit.

Employers are not confused or irrational. They are acting like a class
of people who understand exactly what is at stake. They are bending
over backward to protect their unilateral decision-making authority,
because it is the greatest guarantee of their ability to make choices
that will maximize profits now and into the future. And if maintaining
that control means absorbing some acute short-term costs or committing
significant ongoing resources to maintaining an anti-union
infrastructure capable of detecting and deterring unions, companies
are clearly willing to pay the price.

Class-Struggle Organizing Conversations

So how can workers both understand and overcome the sophisticated,
multibillion-dollar anti-union infrastructure bosses deploy to crush
union drives and maintain their power and profits?

“Organizing drives lose when organizers aren’t honest with workers
and when we don’t have the conversations necessary for workers to
understand how the workplace is structured, how power actually
operates, and why it’s so critical that they unite together if they
are to have any chance of winning,” said Caleb Madison, former
organizing director of Service Employees International Union (SEIU)
1199 New England, where he worked with a team to organize thousands of
nursing home workers into winning their union and contracts.

To Madison, who currently works as the organizing director for the
Rhode Island Tenants Union, there is nothing more dishonest than empty
union slogans like “When We Fight, We Win.” Workers know that
isn’t automatically true. The boss has more money, more lawyers,
expensive consultants, and often even government officials on their
side. The cards are stacked against workers, and pretending otherwise
runs the risk of leaving them unprepared for the intensity of the
fight ahead of them.

Instead, during organizing drives, Madison pushes workers to wrestle
with basic but difficult questions: Who owns the place they work at
and why? Who are the executives, and why are they running the show?
Why don’t you own the nursing home? Why aren’t you in charge? What
are the lives of the owners and managers like? Do they work harder
than you? Are they more deserving?

At first, many workers respond, “I don’t know.” But if
organizers keep pressing, the answers start to surface. The owner
didn’t “pull himself up by his bootstraps” and suddenly acquire
a nursing home chain. The people who populate the board of directors
or executive suites at major companies didn’t just luck into those
roles. Wealth flows from wealth, and power flows from ownership.
Meanwhile, working people survive by getting a job and working for
someone else. And if that workplace is nonunion, there’s a good
chance the boss is spending serious money to make sure it stays that
way.

That clarity becomes a building block.

Pushing workers to think seriously about who the owners are, where
their power comes from, and how their interests differ from our own
leads to a clear conclusion: the workplace is organized to maximize
profits for the owner, and that structure can be studied and mapped.
Who is at the top? Who reports to them? Who sets the rules and
enforces them? The boss has built a chain of command for their
benefit, not for workers, and that chain will fight the union because
it creates a new source of power that threatens the interests that
management is obligated to defend.

This is why anti-union campaigns tend to follow a familiar script —
what can be boiled down to “FUD”: fear, uncertainty, and division.

The boss teams up with outside consultants to ratchet up tension
inside the workplace. There are captive audience meetings, one-on-one
conversations with supervisors, posters on the walls, slick videos on
break room screens, and coordinated messaging that spills into the
broader community.

The themes are predictable: a union will hurt the business, damage the
workplace “family,” and threaten jobs. Managers warn the facility
could close. Activists could be disciplined or fired. Over and over,
the same message is hammered home: Vote the union down, and the
tension disappears. Vote yes, and it only gets worse.

Understanding that the owner has structured the workplace to maximize
profits also makes clear why workers need their own organization. A
union is simply workers coming together to build power — to force
the boss to do what they want or to stop them from doing what they
don’t. But building that kind of power in the face of the boss’s
threats and the extreme tension that results is only possible if
workers are genuinely unified.

“These conversations lead workers to recognize that the person
fundamentally different from you is not the Haitian guy or the trans
woman on the line next to you; it’s the person who owns the company
and has the power to make all the decisions that benefit
themselves,” said Madison. “The only chance workers have of
winning is if they can come together, which is why a major source of
the boss’s power is their ability to sow division in the workplace
around gender, sexuality, race, and ethnicity. Because that keeps
workers from building their organization and power.”

The point is that workplace divisions between workers can’t be
treated as incidental, but are central to how a small but powerful
employer class wages its ongoing war against the working-class
majority. Overcoming those divisions requires organizers to be
deliberate and strategic.

Madison recalls a nursing home campaign where management spent several
million dollars over three months to hire seven union busters for an
organizing drive of just two hundred workers. Because of our weak
labor laws, employers and their hired guns are often emboldened to
fight dirty. This employer explicitly tried to pit Jamaican workers
against African American workers. They sent fake racist text messages
spoofing the organizer’s phone number and sent equally inflammatory
letters to workers’ homes on forged union letterhead. It was, as
Madison put it, “completely nuclear.”

But the workers had already done the hard work of having honest
conversations with each other about how the union’s power is rooted
in their unity and the boss’s power grows from their division. They
were unfazed by the boss’s dirty tricks. And when management fired a
key leader a week before the election, the response was immediate. The
organizing committee immediately organized an emergency phone bank,
and within only a few hours thirty workers out of a workplace of two
hundred showed up to directly and aggressively confront HR.

“The workers marched in and made clear that the company — not the
workers — would have a problem if she wasn’t reinstated,” said
Madison. “The fired workplace leader was brought back with back pay
within hours. It was the speed and size of the response that
worked.”

The employer class has constructed a command-and-control management
structure to maximize profits in a cutthroat market. Many nonunion
companies have invested heavily in anti-union infrastructure to ensure
workers never build a countervailing source of power that could limit
management’s unilateral authority and potentially cut into future
profits. The only way workers can win better lives and working
conditions for themselves is by organizing. And the only way they can
successfully organize is by overcoming the divisions that the boss
depends on.

What is true in one workplace is true across the global economy.
Twelve billionaires now hold more wealth than the bottom half of
humanity — more than four billion people. That level of inequality
does not sustain itself by accident. It is sustained by the enormous
resources that employers deploy against workers and by purposefully
manufacturing and heightening divisions within the working class —
by convincing workers that their lives and jobs are difficult, even
soul crushing, because of some other worker rather than the person who
owns and runs the workplace where they are exploited every day.

To build an organization capable of matching the class power of the
bosses, organizers have to match the boss’s propaganda with honesty.
We can’t sugarcoat the stakes or what is required of us.

So I asked Madison: If we’re no longer chanting, “When We Fight,
We Win,” what should we chant instead?

He joked: “We can beat them if we come together, but it’s really
goddamn hard.”

_Chris Brooks is a veteran labor organizer and strategist focused on
building militant, member-led unions. He is a columnist at
__Jacobin__._

* union organizing
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* anti-union campaigns
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