‘My name is cleared’: the US workers fighting back against union busting
Last year, public support for labor unions hit a high unseen since 1965 amid high-profile union campaigns at major corporations including Apple, Amazon, Starbucks, Chipotle, REI and Trader Joe’s.
This renewed interest has been accompanied by aggressive opposition from employers: threats, intimidation and what workers allege are retaliatory firings. The backlash seems to be working, but workers and their supporters are fighting back.
The tension between popularity and pushback has prompted Senator Bernie Sanders and the US Senate’s health, education, labor and pensions (Help) committee to hold recent hearings on union busting, including what is expected to be a heated hearing with recently departed Starbucks chairman Howard Schultz next Wednesday.
The Help committee hearing comes as the number of petitions for union elections at Starbucks stores has dropped from 71 a month last spring to about 10 a month recently. And, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, last year the union membership rate fell by 0.2 percentage points, to 10.1% – the lowest on record and down from nearly one in three workers during the heyday of unions back in the 1950s.
Labor experts say one of the reasons that union popularity is not translating into union membership is corporate America’s willingness to fire union organizers with few deterrents for doing so. One out of every five union election campaigns involves a claim that a worker was fired in retaliation for union organizing, according to a 2019 report by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI).
Jesse Mason, a Verizon retail worker in Seattle, Washington, was supporting a union organizing drive at another local store and about to start trying to organize a union at his store when he was fired in
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