Unions, Employment Law and Your Small Business |
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September 5th, 2007 -- by Seth Briskin
I was recently invited to speak to a strategic manufacturing roundtable (“Roundtable”) regarding the perceived threat of unionization to small businesses. The Roundtable is a wonderful group of business owners—entrepreneurial men and women who run local companies of different sizes and varied industries.
My topic was chosen because my local paper ran a story about the split of the AFL-CIO and the formation of the Change-To-Win Coalition (CTW) which includes several of the most prominent labor unions: the Teamsters, UNITE HERE, the SEIU, the UFCW and the Carpenters union. In the aftermath of the divisive split, both the AFL-CIO and the CTW announced that they are earmarking millions of dollars to spend on organizing campaigns in an effort to attract more than 500,000 new union members from traditional and non-traditional industries.
Apparently, this news concerned the Roundtable members, and they wanted me to give them an overview of labor law and some strategies to effectively deal with labor unions if they tried to organize their employees.
Before I started to bore the group with the history of labor unions, I asked a series of simple questions: “How many of you have ever been approached by a union organizer?” No hands went up. “How many of you have heard rumors about unionizing efforts or seen union cards distributed by your employees?” No hands went up again. I was not surprised.
While labor unions are certainly desperate for new members (less than 13% of the U.S. workforce is unionized), and I have represented companies in union elections with less than 10 employees, it is very rare. I told the Roundtable that a better use of our time was to ask the question: “Why would my employees be interested in a union?”
In most cases, it has nothing to do with money or benefits—it often comes down to a lack of open communication and consistency in management. Consequently, we spent the rest of the session talking about inexpensive, proactive methods to keep employees happy and informed, which in turn make unions an unnecessary alternative: employee handbooks, supervisory training, employee training, employee benefit/safety committees, progressive disciplinary policies and grievance procedures.
It was time well spent for the Roundtable, and I would suggest that you will be better served to spend your time and money on these simple fixes as well.
