5 Of Big Tech’s Grimiest Union-Busting Tactics

People in New York gather to protest Amazon’s anti-union efforts, Feb. 20, 2021 [AFP/Kena Betancur]

Anti-union sentiment is ferocious at tech companies, and for a long time, management didn’t have much to worry about. High salaries, stock options and hefty benefits packages helped keep white collar workers happy. Those workers often embraced their companies’ utopian mission statements, and few saw themselves as ordinary workers who needed a union. But those attitudes have begun to change.

Many tech workers now object to the “nefarious” purposes to which their work is being put. They’re also learning to expand the definition of tech worker — including contract drivers and shoppers who work for rideshare or food delivery services, without whom Silicon Valley wouldn’t run. Many white collar workers are joining their blue collar colleagues in demanding unions.

The road to unionization is long and winding, and in America, very difficult. According to a 2019 report from the Economic Policy Institute, U.S. employers have been charged by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) with violating federal labor laws in 41.5% of all union election campaigns, and U.S. companies spend at least $340 million a year on union-busting consultants.

Here’s how the good old-fashioned tradition of union busting is getting a Silicon Valley update.

Tweets

How better for a tech CEO to blast his anti-union beliefs than on social media? In 2018, amid efforts by the United Automobile Workers to organize at Tesla, and ahead of Tesla’s NLRB hearing about possible illegal union busting, CEO Elon Musk tweeted, “Why pay union dues & give up stock options for nothing?” His girlfriend, the artist Grimes, also tweeted, then deleted, a message about the UAW, writing, “literally tried to instigate union vote so y’all wud [sic] lay off but UAW can’t get enough signatures cuz they abandoned fremont plant in the last crash.”

Propaganda

Some law firms specialize in union busting on behalf of corporations. Last summer, the law firm Jackson Lewis hosted a webinar for employers and potential clients titled, “Breaking the CODE: Union Organizing in the Video Game and Technology Industries.” The seminar specifically discussed the group Campaign to Organize Digital Employees, founded by the Communications Workers of America earlier that year.

According to tech publication OneZero, the consultants cautioned employers about the “younger, more ‘woke’ component of the workforce” that they employed, and suggested how to undercut their organizing work. And they taught tried-and-true tactics like tweaking their job descriptions to make them ineligible for the union.

Heat-mapping stores for employees

In April, Business Insider reported that Whole Foods, which is owned by Amazon, used a “heat-mapping” tool to show which stores were at risk of unionizing.

Amazon based their assessments on metrics like: how close a store was to another organized union, the number of complaints filed to the NLRB, the poverty rate for the store’s zip code, the racial and ethnic diversity of a store, the average employee compensation, and how employees felt about their workplace. Stores with lower diversity and compensation were at greater risk of unionizing, according to the report.

Profiling employees and exploiting weaknesses

In leaked internal polling data from IRI Consultants, a top union avoidance law firm, Motherboard found that IRI had gathered extensive personal data on 83 employees during a union drive at two Seattle hospitals, in an attempt to use the information to “assess their union sympathies.” Comments on individual employee profiles included details like “a single mother,” “rent [had] increased,” and couldn’t “afford [union] dues,” illustrating the lengths that firms like IRI will go to to exploit weaknesses in workers who have a difficult time making ends meet.

IRI was retained by Google in 2019 during a surge in high-profile worker organizing there.

Pouring millions into ordinance campaigns

In 2020, Uber and Lyft, along with other driver-based services like DoorDash, Instacart and Postmates, spent $224 million to get Californians to vote against classifying drivers as workers instead of as independent contractors. Meanwhile, the Service Employees International Union and United Food & Commercial Workers only raised $16 million. The tech companies won, using their financial heft to set worker organizing among drivers back significantly.