LaborLab Featured in The Guardian and Labor Notes This Week

LaborLab’s research was front and center in two major outlets this week. The Guardian and Labor Notes both covered the AutoZone union drive in White Plains, New York, where 11 workers are trying to do something, nobody has managed in the company’s history: form a union. No AutoZone store or warehouse has organized since a failed drive in 1992, and management is doing all it can to make sure this one doesn’t either.

The campaign is with UAW Local 259 and is headed to an election on September 25. The Guardian put a national spotlight on a fight most people don’t associate with AutoZone at all. And Labor Notes introduced important context, anchored by LaborLab’s  Price of Repression Calculator‘s estimate that AutoZone has spent $210,696 on managers and lawyers to crush the drive. The piece is a wild read: corporate executives flew in the day after the union went public, camped out at a nearby hotel for two months, and by the union’s account had more anti-union brass in the store than workers on the floor. Management also succeeded in carving lead organizer Nathan DuCongé out of the bargaining unit by claiming he’s a supervisor, despite having no hiring or firing authority.

A Bizarre and Alarming Story: Union-Busters Are Now Building Their Own “Unions”

A truly bizarre and troubling story published yesterday. An investigative piece by Documented uncovered a new tactic by a registered union-buster: setting up “independent unions” to raid organized shops. Not only that, but these union-buster-led “unions” are launching new organizing efforts and have mob connections.

The piece traces how Cesar Alarcón, a union-avoidance consultant, has been simultaneously running Progressive Workers of the World Local 311 and Independent Workers of America Local 260, both of which have gone after already-unionized shops, including a successful raid at a Bronx housing complex where workers subsequently lost their contract and health coverage. At Golden Krust in the Bronx, Alarcón’s Local 311 spent months courting workers away from IBEW Local 1430 before the NLRB blocked the raid attempt outright. Documented also traced shared officers, a shared address, and family ties between Local 311 and Local 260, and found that both share an attorney whose other union client has alleged ties to the Colombo crime family.

Our executive director Bob Funk called it one of the strangest union-busting-adjacent situations he’s encountered in years of doing this work. LaborLab has already called on the U.S. Department of Labor to investigate and will continue to push for accountability. However, this is just the latest example of the federal government’s failure to hold the union-busting industry accountable to the law.

Sources: LaborLab, The Guardian, Documented, Labor Notes