Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1382552
20 C I N E M O N T A G E G E T T I N G O R G A N I Z E D generic themes: (1) Be suspicious of the union, (2) trust management, and (3) worry about uncertainty. Talk of union dues, of the salaries of union officials, and of the union as a business are all part of stirring suspicion of the union as an institution. It's critical for management to get workers thinking of the union as an outside third-party that's not to be trusted, rather than a democratic group that includes them. (This characteriza- tion of the union as an external business also manifests itself in bosses referring to organizers as "union salespeople.") It's almost equally important that m a n a g e m e n t m a k e e f f o r t s t o w i n workers' trust. That's why anti-union campaigns generally combine fearmon- gering with a charm offensive. Jennifer Bates, the BHM1 union activist who tes- tified before a Senate committee, spoke to The New Yorker about what such schmoozing looks like from the shop floor: "Since the union surfaced, Amazon has tried to do what we've been crying out for. They're sending human resourc- es on the floor on break, so you'll have time to go talk to them. 'Is there anything you need? Can we help you?' They're being so nice — it's like they brought out the candy jar." It's perhaps a heavy lift for an employer like Amazon — notorious for managing its employees through continuous, impersonal, automated data collection — but management wants workers to believe that the company is a family, and that bosses have employees' best interests at heart. M a n a ge m e n t 's c h a r a c t e r i z a t i o n of the union and its characterization of itself, though, are ultimately both secondary to its characterization of the future. Their primary goal isn't to win hearts and minds, but to sow doubt. Most bosses will be careful to avoid explicit threats, but they'll be sure to allude to the possibility of scary scenarios: Strikes, layoffs, lockouts, the possibility that a union contract could lower instead of lift terms of employment. Amazon repeatedly played on this theme of uncertainty. One of its messages to employees was "With union negoti- ations, you could end up with more, the same…. or less than what you make today." It's true, of course, that nobody can definitively predict the outcome of contract negotiations before they start. But the only way workers would wind up with less than they started with is if management stubbornly insisted on reducing terms. Furthermore, in the a b s e n ce o f a u n i o n , m a n a ge m e n t i s already able to reduce terms at any time, unilaterally, without resistance. In effect management is cautioning workers, "You've got a pretty good job here … Be a shame if something happened to it." From a distance, it's easy to look at all these messages and dismiss them a s u n co nv i n c i n g. B u t wo r ke rs i n a n organizing campaign don't have the luxury of such distance. They're being constantly bombarded, not just through websites, but through texts, compulsory anti-union meetings during their shifts, omnipresent signage in the workplace, even posters in restroom stalls. More- over, management's goal isn't actually to convince anyone; to the contrary, they simply need to cast enough doubt that some previously pro-union workers de- cide that it's better to accept the status quo than to take a chance on trying to make change. The thing about anti-union campaigns is that none of the points the boss makes needs to be particularly per- suasive. The mere fact of the campaign – its advertisement that this company will expend a great deal of effort and money to block its employees' path to a union contract – is a kind of implicit threat itself. Aga i n , I ' ve b e e n re fe r r i n g to t h e particulars of Amazon's union-busting campaign because of its recency and the fact that it was unusually well-doc- u m e n te d . B u t n o e l e m e n t o f t h i s i s unique to Amazon. These themes are sounded by almost every employer that resists unionization, including employers in our industry, including employers that the Editors Guild has organized through union elections. Bosses do it because it works. But the good news is that it doesn't work always. Just as a vaccination can train the body's immune system to ward off a pathogen it might encounter later, introducing these anti-union arguments to organizing workers before they hear them from management dramatically mitigates the harm they can do. In the ar- got of union organizing, in fact, we refer to prepping workers for a boss campaign as "inoculation." The bogeymen that the boss will trot out — whether via a website, in the course of captive audience meetings, or in one-on-one interviews with supervisors — are a lot less scary when a worker has already heard all the bosses' talking points from a trusted coworker or union organizer and knows just what to expect. The core of pro-union workers at BHM1 reportedly remain undaunted. Their union is pressing charges over the company's nearly two dozen alleged violations of the law. Perhaps, at some point in the future, they'll get a chance to vote again. If and when they do, the veterans of this last round will know what's coming. ■ Bosses use the same old tactics because they work.