Influencing Against a Union: the Ethical Way

Many business leaders don’t realize that the right to form a union is a human right with global reach and inadvertently cross a serious legal line trying to prevent it. Wanting to remain union-free isn’t unethical, but how you go about it can be. Once your employees have started talking about forming a union, your legal opportunities to influence them not to are reduced dramatically. Laying the groundwork early is your most important tool, no matter where in the world your employees are located.

Here are five ways you can proactively minimize the risk that your employees will unionize without inviting a lawsuit, risking a front-page news story, or compromising on your values.

1. Find Your Pain Points: Over thousands of worker interviews, Halima never once met a union champion who didn’t have a pain point to talk about. This is always the seed. Ever read a story about delivery drivers having to urinate in bottles in their vehicles? Were you shocked to read just a few months later that there was a union organizing drive? Of course not. Pain points are real scenarios that your employees deal with regularly, and they are a key part of any organizer’s strategy to galvanize support for a union. It may even be what gets your company on a local, national, or international union’s radar and kicks off a well-funded and high profile organizing drive. Find pain points - restroom breaks, scheduling hiccups, arbitrary procedures for taking leave, health and safety concerns - and fix them.

2. Talk to Your People: The best way to find out about those pain points? Regularly seek feedback from your employees, not just management. When you hear about an issue that is impacting your employees’ lived day-to-day experience negatively, make a plan to address it. Communicate back to your team about what steps you’re taking and why, or why not. If your company is large and/or widely dispersed, consider a hotline run by an independent organization, in addition to in-house methods. Don’t just pick the low hanging fruit so you can say you’re responsive, tackle the hard stuff. Who needs an intermediary if management’s open door is the real deal?

3. Support Your First-Line Supervisors:Too often first-line supervisors are people who were great individual contributors, but have no idea how to manage. The same qualities that can make them appealing to promote to supervisor are the same qualities that might make their direct reports look for an advocate: did they always stay late to finish their work, never complain about pain points? They might expect their employees to do the same, even though that’s not the working arrangement. Help them succeed by teaching them supervisory skills - soft skills like how to be approachable and hard skills like how to identify and put a stop to bullying. Supervise them effectively to make sure there’s no abuse of power or other problematic behaviors. Bad first-line supervisors are one of the most common pain points.

4. Make Performance Measurement and Team Metrics Fair: Ensure that employees are transparently measured against achievable, measurable, and relevant standards. Measure management’s performance not just on team output and KPIs but on how well supervisors are managing their people.

5. Pay a Living Wage: As an exercise, look at compensation through a household budget perspective for every locality where you have employees, and do it every year. Can one person pay taxes, rent, utilities, transportation, childcare, average medical expenses, groceries, save for emergencies and retirement, and have something left over for leisure? How about those expenses for a family of four? Yes, it is a budget line item for your company, but so are fancy consultants and economic clauses in collective bargaining agreements. If your employees can’t make ends meet on what you pay, look hard at your model.

Finally, you can do all of these things and your employees may still exercise their right to organize. If your employees have started organizing or you already have a union, it is not the end of the world. Many companies are able to establish productive relationships with their unions and continue to be profitable. Woodhead’s Law can help you with strategies for ethically and legally navigating the employer side of organizing and bargaining.