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**SEPTEMBER 8, 2026**

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American bosses are notorious for fighting union organizing drives tooth and nail. In the 19th century that came in the form of hails of bullets, now it comes in the form of attorneys and consultants who spread anti-union propaganda. A new tool shows workers how much those efforts are likely to cost the business, and it ain’t cheap.

**–Ryan Cooper, senior editor**

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Gabriele Holtermann/Sipa USA via AP Images

How Much Do Union-Busting Campaigns Cost? [link removed]

If there’s a signature American business, it might just be union busting. Bosses in this country have long stood out for their violent hatred of labor organizing. Other nations have had strikes, but few others have had labor conflicts escalate to an outright shooting war [link removed], or company thugs burning and machine-gunning a union tent encampment [link removed] filled with women and children. As the robber baron Jay Gould once boasted, “I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half.”

Today, labor-management relations thankfully do not typically involve exchanges of gunfire. Yet they are still extremely acrimonious by European standards. As a rule, union organizing drives here are not met with good-faith negotiation, but all-out resistance. A $1.7 billion industry of attorneys and consultants exists to stamp out attempts by workers to secure their legally protected bargaining rights.

Today, LaborLab, a workers’ rights watchdog, has released some new tools for union organizers and workers to understand these union-busting firms: who they are, what they do, and above all, how much they cost. With their search tool [link removed], one can examine union-busting law firms, consultants, and individual attorneys; the companies that have hired them; the unfair labor practices they have committed; and much more. With their cost estimator [link removed], one can make a rough guess at how much a typical union-busting drive would cost, depending on the workplace, number of employees, length of campaign, and so on.

They are highly useful tools for union organizers and workers. “We envision worker-organizers, union staffers and labor attorneys using the search tool to identify unions that have previously dealt with a particular anti-union attorney or consultant, learn from their experience and share that information with other workers,” said Bob Funk, executive director of LaborLab, in a statement. And it might even be useful for employers, too.

LaborLab’s tool should not really be necessary, because there is already a law that mandates this kind of disclosure. The Labor Management Reporting and Disclosure Act of 1959 mandates that any expenditure associated with union avoidance campaigns must be disclosed to the secretary of labor every year. “Workers are supposed to have a sense of how much employers are spending on union busting,” said Teke Wiggin, research director at LaborLab.

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****ON OUR SITE****

By all indications, the midterm elections should produce a massive blue wave, unless of course Trump and his thugs manage to steal it [link removed].

Ottawa paid a price to open the Gordie Howe International Bridge. Now the bet [link removed] that retaliatory tariffs plus the midterms force Americans to end meme-driven trade policy.

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