Progressives Urge Biden Administration To Crack Down On ‘Union-Busting’ Industry

Every year, U.S. employers spend millions of dollars on outside consultants who specialize in breaking up union campaigns. Because much of that work is cloaked in secrecy , progressive groups are urging the Biden administration to crack down and make it more transparent.

A paper released Wednesday recommends that the Labor Department force employers and their consultants to make greater financial disclosures related to anti-union spending so workers can better understand who’s being paid to lobby them. The authors write that the firms are “deploying increasingly aggressive tactics to dissuade employees from unionizing.”

The paper was co-released by Harvard Law School’s Center for Labor and a Just Economy, the nonprofit watchdog group LaborLab, and the advocacy group Governing for Impact, which has been pushing the Biden administration to pursue progressive federal regulations.

Sharon Block, a labor law professor at Harvard and a co-author of the paper, said in an interview that the government should be shedding more light on the work of “union busters.”

“This is an urgent problem because we are seeing more organizing ,” said Block, who previously ran the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs in the Biden White House. “It’s super important that those [union] elections actually reflect the will of those workers and that they’re not a reflection of manipulation or fear or coercion.”

The recommendations come on the heels of an investigation by the Labor Department’s inspector general finding that the agency “did not effectively enforce” the law when it came to anti-union consultants.

Federal law requires employers and consultants to disclose their arrangements to the Labor Department when they’re trying to