Trends in Union Corporate Campaigns - US Chamber of Commerce

STRATEGY
The central strategic concept underlying the corporate campaign
is known as power structure analysis. As characterized by
Ray Rogers, who, with Mr. Locker, is generally credited with
developing labor’s first corporate campaigns, waged by the
textile workers union against Farah Manufacturing and J.P.
Stevens in the mid-1970s, power structure analysis is a means of
“organizing workers” by “disorganizing companies.” 5 Or as he
put it on another occasion,
The goal of a corporate campaign is to polarize the entire
corporate and financial community away from a primary
target, thus pulling its most crucial underpinnings out from
underneath it. 6
What might such polarization look like? The following excerpt
from a news story on efforts to keep Wal-Mart Supercenters out of
the Washington, DC, market—part of a national effort by labor to
limit Wal-Mart’s growth by attacking its role as corporate citizen
—is a good exemplar.
“I would not stand up in front of a zoning meeting and
say, ‘I am here to bring you Wal-Mart,’ “ said one local
developer, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of
jeopardizing future relations with the company. “There is
an anti-Wal-Mart hysteria in this area.” 7
In other words, the campaign’s ability to create a negative image
of the company was sufficiently powerful in this instance to
lead a stakeholder—in this case a real estate developer—to act
differently than he otherwise might on a routine matter, and
in a way that was disadvantageous to the company. In such
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