set up your anti-union guerrillas.
It is important to be always on your guard, this useful vade mecum reminds you, and to be attentive to any warning signs of emerging trade union activity: when ‘groups of people who are deep in conversation suddenly clam up when supervisors approach’, when ‘graffiti hostile to the business appears on the restroom walls’ (and these same restrooms start attracting a lot of people even when, as far as you know, there is no epidemic of ‘gastro-enteritis), you may well suspect that people are getting together well in the restroom to discuss something’.34
If the movement is confirmed, establish a ‘war room’ in the management offices, a command post that will act as ‘a centre of activity’.35 On the wall, you’ll pin a big diagram listing ‘the names of all employees by department with the designation “union,” “company,” and “?”’ – which will give you an overview of the loyalty of your employees. All the relevant information will need to be taken up daily to the war room. Thus, informed in real time of how things are developing on the battlefield, management can ‘determine the strategy and decide on effective counter-attack techniques’.36
It’s your turn to campaign, distribute leaflets and put up posters – the manual provides you with templates, all you need to do is get them photocopied. One example of a slogan on a poster: ‘Yes, you have something to lose in voting for a union: freedom to solve your own problems individually and directly with the management’.37 In addition to posters and leaflets, the manual suggests you have made some anti-union ‘fortune cookies’ to hand out in the canteen, stuffed with relevant messages. The employee breaks open the cookie and reads: ‘Union dues put rice in someone else’s bowl’, or ‘Sorry, no luck with the union’ or ‘Beware of dragon in organizer’s magic lamp’.38 Other procedures of the same kind include organizing free cocktail evenings or even offering your employees a free turkey for Thanksgiving – a tangible economic reminder of the commitment of the employer to a happy and satisfied workforce.39 On this occasion, between raising two toasts, ‘the company will highlight the fact that the strong feelings of loyalty employees feel toward him would be disturbed by the presence of a union’.40
And, if, despite all these efforts, you still can’t solve the problem, you will always be able to use the services of anti-union consultants who will come, in commando mode, to lend you a helping hand ‘aimed at the areas of greatest worker vulnerability as divined by their psychological spade-work’.41 One of these reformed ‘union busters’ testified in his autobiography to what was more concretely implied by this combined strategy of misinformation and personal attacks: ‘as the consultants go about the business of destroying unions, they invade people’s lives, demolish their friendships, crush their will, and shatter their families’.42 As one unionist said: ‘their weapons are emotional intimidation and the subversion of the law. Whenever and wherever working people seek to organize, this guerrilla army dressed in three-piece suits stands ready to resist’.43
When journalist Beth Nissen got a job incognito with Texas Instruments in 1978 so that she could produce a report on unionism, she felt the fear that was now prevalent among the employees. While discussing the issue of the union with a colleague, the latter replied: ‘Please don’t talk to me on break any more. […] If the company finds out I’m listening, I’ll get fired’.44 For simply mentioning the possibility of joining a trade union, the undercover reporter was dismissed on some spurious context barely three weeks after being hired.
Notes
1 1. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (Metalibri Digital Editions, 2007), pp. 105–6 (available at https://www.ibiblio.org/ml/libri/s/SmithA_WealthNations_p.pdf).
2 2. ‘The U.S. Can’t Afford What Labor Wants: New Union Militancy Could Skyrocket Wages and Trigger Runaway Inflation’, Business Week, 11 April 1970, p. 105.
3 3. Ibid., p. 107.
4 4. Gilbert Burck, ‘Union Power and the New Inflation’, Fortune, February 1971, pp. 65–70 (p. 65).
5 5. Richard Armstrong, ‘Labor 1970: Angry, Aggressive, Acquisitive’, Fortune, October 1969, reprinted in Compensation & Benefits Review, vol. 2, no. 1, January 1970, pp. 37–42 (p. 37).
6 6. Ibid., p. 41. And: ‘The blue-collar worker is in the crosscurrent of social change, disgruntled about his bosses and “the system”; and sensitive to the black-power revolution within the ranks of labor’ (p. 37).
7 7. Ibid., p. 41.
8 8. Quoted in ibid., p. 41.
9 9. Murray J. Gart, ‘Labor’s Rebellious Rank and File’, Fortune, November 1966, quoted in Brenner, ‘Rank-and-File Rebellion, 1967–1976’, PhD dissertation, Columbia University, 1996, p. 26.
10 10. Rejecting, too, stark a difference between economics and politics, he sought to theorize a ‘politics of production’. ‘The term “internal state” refers to the set of institutions that organize, transform, or repress struggles over relations in production and relations of production at the level of the enterprise’ (Michael Burawoy, Manufacturing Consent: Changes in the Labor Process Under Monopoly Capitalism (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1979), p. 110.
11 11. Ibid., p. 109.
12 12. See Michael Burawoy, ‘Manufacturing Consent revisited’, La Nouvelle Revue du travail [online], no. 1, 2012, http://journals.openedition.org/nrt/143.
13 13. See Armstrong, ‘Labor 1970’, p. 38.
14 14. See Thomas Byrne Edsall, The New Politics of Inequality (New York: Norton, 1984), p. 155.
15 15. Douglas Fraser, ‘Letter of resignation from the Labor-Management Advisory Committee’, 19 July 1978, quoted in Samuel Bowles, David M. Gordon and Thomas E. Weisskopf, After the Waste Land: Democratic Economics for the Year 2000 (New York: Routledge, 2015; first published in 1990), p. 30. Almost unconsciously, comments Covey, Fraser produced an interpretation that tells us a great deal about the said compromise which, if we are to believe him, rested less on the power of labour and more on the tactical and temporary tolerance of capital. See Jefferson R. Cowie, Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class (New York: New Press, 2010), p. 297.
16 16. A.H. Raskin, ‘Big Labor Strives to Break Out of Its Rut’, Fortune, 27 August 1979, quoted in Cowie, Stayin’ Alive, p. 298. The contradiction, explains Michele Naples, lies in the fact that the ‘truce’ between capital and labour provided the institutional setting for relative economic prosperity, a prosperity which itself provided the economic context in which workers could struggle for their interests, and thereby undermine the truce (Michele I. Naples, ‘The Unraveling of the Union-Capital Truce and the U.S. Industrial Productivity Crisis’, Review of Radical Political Economics, vol. 18, nos. 1&2, 1986, pp. 110–31, [p. 116]).
17 17. See Fritz Machlup, ‘Monopolistic Wage Determination as a Part of the General Problem of Monopoly’, in Wage Determination and the Economics of Liberalism (Washington, DC: Chamber of Commerce of the United States, 1947).
18 18. Henry C. Simons, ‘Reflections on Syndicalism’, Journal of Political Economy, vol. 52, no. 1, March 1944, pp. 1–25 (p. 5).
19 19. Quoted in Yves Steiner, ‘The Neoliberals Confront the Trade Unions’, in Philip Mirowski and Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pelerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective
