In practice, many of the country’s largest corporations are paying enormous sums to maintain a permanent internal anti-union operation designed to detect and suppress organizing before it spreads — and then make calculated interventions once workers are in motion.

“Amazon, Starbucks, and other companies have employee relations specialists, and one of their specialties is managing what they call ‘labor risk,’” said Wiggin. “These specialists scout out locations where employee dissatisfaction might turn into organizing and then are deployed to mitigate the risk. They also manage employee engagement programs, which are understood to be active surveillance and management of workers with the explicit purpose of avoiding unions.”

A 2025 survey of HR professionals, senior executives, and in-house attorneys by notorious union-busting law firm Littler Mendelson acknowledges that nearly half of nonunion employers have rolled out or expanded “employee engagement” programs specifically to head off organizing. These initiatives, which range from internal surveys to structured listening campaigns, typically cost between 1 and 2 percent of total payroll. Given that US wages run into the trillions, even allocating a small share of that spending toward union avoidance would push the true cost of employer anti-union activity far beyond what has been estimated by EPI and LaborLab, potentially into the tens of billions annually.

And that may still understate the real cost of union avoidance. Employers also spend enormous sums raising wages and benefits to deter organizing — as nonunion auto companies did after the United Auto Workers’ “stand-up strike.” Once those costs are included, the true price of suppressing unions may run into the hundreds of billions annually.

In almost every major strike or scorched-earth union-busting campaign, workers eventually ask the same question: Wouldn’t it be cheaper for the boss to just give us what we’re asking for?

I’ve personally negotiated with employers who refused to bargain jointly across multiple newly organized units at the same company, insisting instead on separate negotiating tables and contracts for workers doing identical jobs in different locations. The result would have been wildly inefficient: different grievance timelines, different wage rates, different benefit structures inside the same self-funded insurance plan. This would have resulted in enormous administrative nightmares and contractual liabilities for these companies, yet it’s the employers who were demanding it.

What explains this? If corporations are willing to incur billions of dollars in costs, financial and productivity losses, legal exposure, and reputational damage rather than recognizing a union or agreeing to a contract, what exactly are they defending? Are employers simply prioritizing their authority to control the workplace how they see fit over profits?

“Employers are not choosing workplace control over the maximization of profits, but seeking to maintain workplace control as the means for maximizing profits,” said Vivek Chibber, a professor of sociology at New York University. Employers operate in a world of uncertainty, he argues, and what they prize most is freedom of action:

What businesses see looking out into the future is enormous uncertainty, and what they take as the solution to that uncertainty is full freedom to respond to changes in demand, changes in customer profiles, and changes in government policies and regulations. The union is an added risk to their ability to make profits and maintain position in a highly competitive market, because the union might tie an employer’s hands in a billion different ways.

From that vantage point, even a potentially cooperative union is an encumbrance. “To the employer, incurring short-term costs, even if they’re heavy, is worth it if it means they can avoid having a union in the shop,” Chibber explains. “From their perspective, once a union is allowed into the door, management has to live with it.”

In other words, unions narrow what Chibber calls “management’s zone of freedom.” They reduce the unilateral discretion that executives rely on to restructure, discipline, outsource, or pivot when markets shift. The boss might hand out a raise or fire a widely hated supervisor during an organizing drive to blunt momentum, but what they are not surrendering is the power to decide whether that raise is given or whether that supervisor stays or goes. Still, that power is only a means to an end. The authoritarianism of the workplace is secondary to the drive for profit.

Employers are not confused or irrational. They are acting like a class of people who understand exactly what is at stake. They are bending over backward to protect their unilateral decision-making authority, because it is the greatest guarantee of their ability to make choices that will maximize profits now and into the future. And if maintaining that control means absorbing some acute short-term costs or committing significant ongoing resources to maintaining an anti-union infrastructure capable of detecting and deterring unions, companies are clearly willing to pay the price.

So how can workers both understand and overcome the sophisticated, multibillion-dollar anti-union infrastructure bosses deploy to crush union drives and maintain their power and profits?

“Organizing drives lose when organizers aren’t honest with workers and when we don’t have the conversations necessary for workers to understand how the workplace is structured, how power actually operates, and why it’s so critical that they unite together if they are to have any chance of winning,” said Caleb Madison, former organizing director of Service Employees International Union (SEIU) 1199 New England, where he worked with a team to organize thousands of nursing home workers into winning their union and contracts.

To Madison, who currently works as the organizing director for the Rhode Island Tenants Union, there is nothing more dishonest than empty union slogans like “When We Fight, We Win.” Workers know that isn’t automatically true. The boss has more money, more lawyers, expensive consultants, and often even government officials on their side. The cards are stacked against workers, and pretending otherwise runs the risk of leaving them unprepared for the intensity of the fight ahead of them.

Instead, during organizing drives, Madison pushes workers to wrestle with basic but difficult questions: Who owns the place they work at and why? Who are the executives, and why are they running the show? Why don’t you own the nursing home? Why aren’t you in charge? What are the lives of the owners and managers like? Do they work harder than you? Are they more deserving?

At first, many workers respond, “I don’t know.” But if organizers keep pressing, the answers start to surface. The owner didn’t “pull himself up by his bootstraps” and suddenly acquire a nursing home chain. The people who populate the board of directors or executive suites at major companies didn’t just luck into those roles. Wealth flows from wealth, and power flows from ownership. Meanwhile, working people survive by getting a job and working for someone else. And if that workplace is nonunion, there’s a good chance the boss is spending serious money to make sure it stays that way.

That clarity becomes a building block.

Pushing workers to think seriously about who the owners are, where their power comes from, and how their interests differ from our own leads to a clear conclusion: the workplace is organized to maximize profits for the owner, and that structure can be studied and mapped. Who is at the top? Who reports to them? Who sets the rules and enforces them? The boss has built a chain of command for their benefit, not for workers, and that chain will fight the union because it creates a new source of power that threatens the interests that management is obligated to defend.

This is why anti-union campaigns tend to follow a familiar script — what can be boiled down to “FUD”: fear, uncertainty, and division.

The boss teams up with outside consultants to ratchet up tension inside the workplace. There are captive audience meetings, one-on-one conversations with supervisors, posters on the walls, slick videos on break room screens, and coordinated messaging that spills into the broader community.

The themes are predictable: a union will hurt the business, damage the workplace “family,” and threaten jobs. Managers warn the facility could close. Activists could be disciplined or fired. Over and over, the same message is hammered home: Vote the union down, and the tension disappears. Vote yes, and it only gets worse.

Understanding that the owner has structured the workplace to maximize profits also makes clear why workers need their own organization. A union is simply workers coming together to build power — to force the boss to do what they want or to stop them from doing what they don’t. But building that kind of power in the face of the boss’s threats and the extreme tension that results is only possible if workers are genuinely unified.

“These conversations lead workers to recognize that the person fundamentally different from you is not the Haitian guy or the trans woman on the line next to you; it’s the person who owns the company and has the power to make all the decisions that benefit themselves,” said Madison. “The only chance workers have of winning is if they can come together, which is why a major source of the boss’s power is their ability to sow division in the workplace around gender, sexuality, race, and ethnicity. Because that keeps workers from building their organization and power.”

The point is that workplace divisions between workers can’t be treated as incidental, but are central to how a small but powerful employer class wages its ongoing war against the working-class majority. Overcoming those divisions requires organizers to be deliberate and strategic.

Madison recalls a nursing home campaign where management spent several million dollars over three months to hire seven union busters for an organizing drive of just two hundred workers. Because of our weak labor laws, employers and their hired guns are often emboldened to fight dirty. This employer explicitly tried to pit Jamaican workers against African American workers. They sent fake racist text messages spoofing the organizer’s phone number and sent equally inflammatory letters to workers’ homes on forged union letterhead. It was, as Madison put it, “completely nuclear.”

But the workers had already done the hard work of having honest conversations with each other about how the union’s power is rooted in their unity and the boss’s power grows from their division. They were unfazed by the boss’s dirty tricks. And when management fired a key leader a week before the election, the response was immediate. The organizing committee immediately organized an emergency phone bank, and within only a few hours thirty workers out of a workplace of two hundred showed up to directly and aggressively confront HR.

“The workers marched in and made clear that the company — not the workers — would have a problem if she wasn’t reinstated,” said Madison. “The fired workplace leader was brought back with back pay within hours. It was the speed and size of the response that worked.”

The employer class has constructed a command-and-control management structure to maximize profits in a cutthroat market. Many nonunion companies have invested heavily in anti-union infrastructure to ensure workers never build a countervailing source of power that could limit management’s unilateral authority and potentially cut into future profits. The only way workers can win better lives and working conditions for themselves is by organizing. And the only way they can successfully organize is by overcoming the divisions that the boss depends on.

What is true in one workplace is true across the global economy. Twelve billionaires now hold more wealth than the bottom half of humanity — more than four billion people. That level of inequality does not sustain itself by accident. It is sustained by the enormous resources that employers deploy against workers and by purposefully manufacturing and heightening divisions within the working class — by convincing workers that their lives and jobs are difficult, even soul crushing, because of some other worker rather than the person who owns and runs the workplace where they are exploited every day.

To build an organization capable of matching the class power of the bosses, organizers have to match the boss’s propaganda with honesty. We can’t sugarcoat the stakes or what is required of us.

So I asked Madison: If we’re no longer chanting, “When We Fight, We Win,” what should we chant instead?

He joked: “We can beat them if we come together, but it’s really goddamn hard.”