Anti-Union Retaliation

As unions are started in unlikely places, companies with massive financial resources and habits of underpaying, overworking, or neglecting their workers can only actively do two things in response.  They can adjust compensation, workloads, and working conditions as needed in order to treat workers as more than disposable, inferior beings used as utilitarian tools, or they can hold onto oppressive workplace norms as strongly as they can and fight unionization, which threatens the traditions they are used to.  Every other response is a mere passive reaction, a waiting to see what happens or an inactivity spurred by a lack of attention on the matter.  That even enormous corporations like Amazon would oppose unionization hints at how powerful its consequences can be.

What unions allow for is for the plight and vulnerability of individual workers to not be so easily exploited by company leadership.  After all, unions are collectives of workers, bound to the same company or industry, giving them more power when they threaten to go on strike or resist genuine oppression.  One worker might seem to be isolated or could be intimidated into silence, but to pay an entire workforce less than livable wages, to engage in everything from petty abuses of power to obvious illicit discrimination, ignore unsafe working conditions, or discourage employee feedback is much more difficult when workers are transparent with each other.  Enraged or terrified by what collective bargaining and openness can achieve, corporate leaders might try to stop unionization efforts or disband unions through several methods.

A branch/location of a company might be shut down right as talk of unionizing is becoming more popular or right as an established union pushes back against corporate oppression.  As long as people who are not invested in supporting unions do not notice the timing, and as long as suppressing a union is not the stated goal of the decision, a company might be able to deter employees from unionizing simply by closing stores (or threatening to close them).  They do not necessarily risk any legal response under these circumstances, and they probably will not until unions become more prominent--something that is already becoming more and more normal with newer unions at certain Amazon or Starbucks buildings.

Another more direct way to attack unions is to simply be brazen in words and actions of hostility towards any workers who participate in or verbally support unions.  Anti-union companies might even somewhat improve pay, benefits, or working conditions for non-unionized locations, perhaps even going so far as to point to this as an example of how unions do not always get what they set out to receive!  They might even try all of these tactics together and see how unions or workers attempting to start unions handle them.  No, it is not true that all companies will oppose unions by default or that unions cannot be corrupt as well, but the process of unionization is unlikely to be a smooth one for every first wave in a revival of unionization.

Anti-union retaliation in America is something that unionizing employees will have to endure in many cases until there are more established unions to normalize the process or until the commonality of workplace exploitation diminishes.  It might be years or decades before more widespread progress is made towards encouraging and protecting unions from corporate vengeance, but the steps towards developing a more stable set of unions are already being taken.  In countries or communities where the government, large businesses, and general stupidity all directly oppress workers, unions are the best way to fight workplace injustices other than embracing reason and justice in all things, but the latter, despite being the most important part, is the part that even unionizing employees will almost certainly never choose to do.