Corporate union busting in plain sight

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How Amazon, Starbucks, and Trader Joe’s crushed dynamic grassroots worker organizing campaigns

Labor activism in the United States has had a remarkable resurgence over the last three years (NLRB 2022; Combs 2023). In the past few years, workers mounted successful organizing campaigns at a wide range of companies, including Amazon, Starbucks, Trader Joe’s, Apple, Barnes and Noble, Ben & Jerry’s, Chipotle, REI, and Volkswagen. Moreover, according to Gallup polls, 70% of the U.S. public—and almost 90% of young workers—approve of unions, a figure not seen since the mid-1960s (Saad 2023). Even more remarkable, unions are wildly popular despite their organizational weakness: In the mid-1960s, they represented almost one-third of private-sector workers, while today they represent fewer than 6%. At the bargaining table, unions have won record wage increases at companies such as UPS (Gurley 2023), the Big Three auto companies (Whalen 2023), Kaiser Permanente (Simmons-Duffin 2024), and Disney (Isidore et al. 2023; Rainey et al. 2024).

Further, according to recent studies, 60 million American workers want to form unions (Kochan et al. 2018; Mishel et al. 2020; EPI 2021). In recent years, the desire for organizing has been especially apparent among young workers—who entered the labor market after the Great Recession and have experienced precarious employment conditions—who have tried to form unions in multiple sectors (Scheiber 2022). Despite this momentum, union density has continued to decline. The most recent Bureau of Labor Statistics data found that 16 million workers are covered by a union contract, a 170,000 decline from the prior year (BLS 2025). What explains this disconnect? Two intractable problems explain why union popularity, bargaining victories, and renewed labor activism haven’t translated into higher union density: (1) disastrously weak labor laws and (2) ferocious corporate opposition to worker organizing. Until these issues are addressed, union membership and density will continue to decline.

Previous studies have analyzed the issues of weak labor laws and strong employer opposition (McNicholas et al. 2019). This report focuses on corporate union busting and examines the tactics, both legal and illegal, that corporations routinely employ to defeat worker organizing efforts and resist reaching a first contract. After reviewing union busting tactics, the report analyzes three high-profile worker organizing campaigns.

Corporate union busting is an enormous barrier to worker organizing

Workers at Starbucks, Amazon, and Trader Joe’s have encountered multibillion-dollar corporations who are prepared to do whatever is necessary, lawful or unlawful, to crush their organizing campaigns. Unlawful acts have taken multiple forms, including:

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https://www.epi.org/publication/corporate-union-busting/