Trends in Union Corporate Campaigns - US Chamber of Commerce

OBJECTIVES
Sometimes, where employers already have unionized workforces,
those “benefits” take the form of contract concessions, and
sometimes, where the union has policy interests, they take the
form of political concessions. Recent campaigns by the so-called
Coordinated Bargaining Committee, representing fourteen unions
with members employed by General Electric, are an example of
the former. The 2005 campaign by organized labor against the
Bush administration’s proposed Social Security reforms, in which
the unions pressured individual financial services companies to
drop their support for the plan, illustrates the latter. But most of
the action in corporate campaigns today, and certainly the most
extensive and most aggressive campaigns, are centered on efforts
to organize workers.
The earliest corporate campaigns, such as those at Farah and J.P.
Stevens in the 1970s, were focused on organizing, but in that era
the explicit objective was to bring about representation elections
as provided under the National Labor Relations Act. In these
elections, once at least 30 percent of workers in a prospective
bargaining unit sign cards petitioning the National Labor Relations
Board (NLRB) to conduct a secret-ballot election, the regional
office(s) of the NLRB will administer a vote, usually in the
workplace itself. As in all things bureaucratic, there are rules of
procedure, the basic result of which is that both the union and the
company are permitted to communicate their views to the workers,
after which the workers mark their ballots. The NLRB tallies the
votes and, if a majority of workers so indicate, certifies the union as
their bargaining agent. The employer is then required to bargain
with the union. We can think of this as retail organizing — gaining
the right to represent workers from the bottom up, vote by vote.
This procedure is illustrated in Figure 2(a).
Trends in Union Corporate Campaigns
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