Trends in Union Corporate Campaigns - US Chamber of Commerce

Table 1, Continued
Post warnings or contact customers to notify of potentially
embarrassing or inconvenient experiences if they patronize the
company
Pressure company through surrogates such as Jobs with Justice,
National Interfaith Committee for Worker Justice
Encourage investigations of potential antitrust, tax or other violations
File, encourage or support litigation against the company
Leverage differing international labor climates against U.S.-
based multinationals or U.S. subsidiaries of non-U.S. (e.g., European)
companies
Use the OECD and other international organizations to pressure
company
Employ race, class and similar themes as elements of attacks on the
company
its cause, the dynamic is actually rather different. One principal
objective of pre-campaign research is to identify the full range of
each stakeholder’s own interests and objectives and to cull out
those that might be selectively activated to advance the cause of
the campaign. The union then looks for opportunities to set those
stakeholder self-interests in motion. When practiced successfully,
this can be a very sophisticated exercise. Table 1 lists a few of the
tactics employed by unions engaged in corporate campaigns.
A definitive, but hardly unique, example of selective activation,
and one with enduring consequences, is provided by a campaign
waged by the hotel employees union (HERE) against Marriott
International. At the time, 1998, HERE Local 2 was trying
to organize workers at the company’s hotel in downtown San
Francisco. 10 The Marriott family owned about 20 percent of the
company’s shares, and private investors another 30 percent, with
Trends in Union Corporate Campaigns
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