The campaign exploded onto the scene in February: expensive, full-page ads in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post. Radio ads on the major stations in Boston. Editorials in right-wing papers such as the Washington Times. A flashy new website. Altogether, according to the man behind it, a $5 million-a-year public relations blitz. The target of this all-out assault: labor unions. The vehicle: an innocuous sounding organization called the Center for Union Facts.

Smear tactics

Who’s behind the Center, its founder, Richard Berman, won’t say, except to note that he’s already raised $2.5 million from companies, trade organizations, and individuals. But Berman addressed a conference of the state Chambers of Commerce in January, where, according to one attendee, participants pledged millions of dollars in support. And Randel Johnson, a vice-president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the pro-corporate lobby group, served as an advisor in creating the Center. (Sarah Longwell, spokesperson for the Center for Union Facts, did not return repeated phone calls.)

The Man Behind the Curtain The anti-union Center for Union Facts is the brainchild of Rick Berman, a corporate lobbyist who has headed up a long string of industry front groups. Over the years he has created or directed: The Guest Choice Network, which received funding from Philip Morris in 1995 to fight smoking bans in restaurants and bars, falsely claiming there is a “lack of evidence that second-hand smoking causes cancer” The Center for Consumer Freedom, created in 2001 and funded by junk food companies such as Coca-Cola and Wendy’s, which claims the obesity crisis is a “myth” and slams fast-food critics as “food police” The Employment Policies Institute, funded by manufacturers and the restaurant industry, which fights against any increase to the federal minimum wage and opposes employer-provided health insurance The American Beverage Institute, funded by alcohol makers and distributors, which opposes drunk driving laws Fishscam.com, a campaign launched last December to convince pregnant women that it’s safe to eat large quantities of mercurytainted tuna, despite warnings from the Food and Drug Administration

Berman himself is a well-known corporate attack dog, who has taken money from the alcohol, tobacco, and fast food industries to campaign against drunk driving laws, smoking bans, and the federal minimum wage. (See box, “The Man Behind the Curtain,” right.) Because he can’t advance these causes on the merits, his strategy is to smear his opponents, claiming that groups like Mothers Against Drunk Driving “use…intimidation tactics, and even threats of violence to push their radical agendas.” His network of fake grass roots organizations, with populist sounding names like the Center for Consumer Freedom, typically channel millions of dollars directly back into his own lobbying firm, Berman & Co., and also violate the boundaries of nonprofit “charitable” work—a track record so shoddy that one ethics watchdog group has called for a full Congressional investigation.

In Berman’s new attack on unions, says Mary Beth Maxwell, director of the pro-union group American Rights at Work, “you can see the old play book at work.” One ad shows a padlocked factory gate with the caption “Brought to you by the union ‘leaders’ who helped bankrupt steel, auto, and airline companies”—as if these companies’ business strategies had been dictated by union officials.

Warping the facts

A Center press release entitled, “Hypocritical Union Leaders Overpaid,” claims that salaries of union officers rank with that of corporate CEOs. But according to Berman’s slick website, UnionFacts.com, the president of Communications Workers of America (CWA) earned $172,295 in 2005—less than 2 percent the size of CEO salaries at companies with the most CWA members. The CEO of SBC, for example, earned $15.7 million in 2004 and the CEO of Verizon, $17.3 million.

The website boasts that it exposes unions’ “dirty laundry,” such as Unfair Labor Practice charges filed against unions. But it fails to mention that many charges were unsubstantiated. For example, the site lists only one charge filed against Local 1180—and that charge was never substantiated. “These are the old arguments folks always put out when they’re trying to discredit labor,” says Maxwell. “It’s just new packaging.”

So why is this attack coming now, with the number of unionized workers in a steady downward slide and with the labor movement facing a national split? Lee Cokorinos, the author of several reports and books on right-wing politics, says that “even though there are tremendous problems within the labor movement, there are models out there setting the stage for a resurgence.” These models include using card check in unionization drives (see box, “The Campaign Against Card Check,” at bottom), the introduction of legislation to force large companies to provide health care coverage, and corporate campaigns that unite labor unions and community groups in pressuring exploitative companies. “The Wal-Mart campaigns have really stunned them,” Cokorinos says, “especially the victory in Maryland, forcing Wal-Mart to pay its share of health care costs. Wal-Mart is practically toxic now in terms of PR. And the right’s think tanks are weighing in to counter this.”

A broader attack

The Berman-led campaign is just one part of a broader assault on labor. Only about 100 union-busting consultants existed in the late 1960s, but some 2,000 such firms today constitute a $1 billion-a-year industry. They draft anti-union literature, teach managers how to scare off union support, and run workshops with titles like “How to Stay Union Free.” And they’re hired by corporations to combat three out of every four union organizing drives. According to a study by John Logan, a professor at the London School of Economics, “by the 1990s, the consultants themselves, their anti-union ideology, and their vast armory of counter-organizing tactics had all become deeply ingrained in the fabric of labor-management relations, with disastrous consequences for unions.”

The message of these consultants is bolstered by pro-corporate advocacy organizations such as the Alliance for Worker Freedom, founded by conservative activist Grover Norquist, which seeks to increase the number of so-called “right to work” states, and rightwing think tanks, such as the National Legal and Policy Center, which produces a “Union Corruption Update” to feed antiunion stories to the news media.

In recent years, the assault on unions has come from inside the government as well. Bush stacked the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), once a relatively neutral arbiter of labor-management disputes, with pro-business conservatives such as Robert Battista, an attorney who helped Detroit newspapers bust unions in the 1990s. The board has excluded entire classes of workers, such as graduate teaching assistants, from its protection. It has thrown obstacles in the path of temps seeking to unionize. It has used technicalities to declare strikes illegal, and much more.

Fred Feinstein, a professor at the University of Maryland who was general counsel to the NLRB under President Clinton, says that ever since the Reagan era, “the board has become increasingly enmeshed in the campaign against unions.” During the Clinton years, the board “struggled” to restore the board’s former role, but that ended with the election of George W. Bush. “We now have a board whose decisions are contributing to union decline, decisions that appear at best indifferent to the enormous obstacles that workers face today when they try to organize,” Feinstein says. “At every opportunity, this board tips the scale in one direction—toward management.”

And the Bush Labor Department has made undermining unions—rather than protecting workers—its primary task. In 2003, Labor Secretary Elaine Chao instituted onerous new financial reporting requirements on labor unions, called LM-2’s, which have produced data that Berman mined for UnionFacts.com. Earlier, Chao rescinded reporting requirements for anti-union consultants— leaving most of their union-busting campaigns free from federal scrutiny. Chao has added dozens of new staffers to audit union finances, while cutting back on staff for enforcement of occupational health and minimum wage. In March, a Chao public liaison sent out an email alert encouraging people to check out “a new website…dedicated to providing information on labor unions and their expenditures.” Yes, the U.S. Labor Department was promoting Berman’s anti-union website, UnionFacts.com.

Whose message will win out?

The Center for Union Facts attack comes at a time when organized labor is on its heels, fighting off crippling policies in Washington while trying to organize workers in an increasingly mobile economy. But its effects may be countered by successful unionization drives.

The day Berman launched his attack ads in L.A., the local press was dominated by word of a new organizing drive among the city’s lowest paid hotel workers. Stories in the Los Angeles Times and elsewhere captured the stresses faced by workers living hand-to-mouth without health coverage, such as Maria Morataya, whose daughter nearly lost her hand to an infection because her mother couldn’t afford a doctor. The new L.A. mayor, a former labor organizer himself, is sympathetic to their cause. “The truth really does aid us in dealing with a sleazy campaign like Berman’s,” says Mary Beth Maxwell. “People want to improve their lives. They want to join unions for that reason. Allies are standing behind them. That’s the best antidote to the lies in these ads.” 

The Campaign Against Card Check The full-page ad ran in the Los Angeles Times in March, just weeks after the launch of a campaign to raise the poverty-level wages of local hotel workers. “Who said it?” the ad asks, showing photos of Kim Jong Il, Fidel Castro, and UNITE HERE president Bruce Raynor under the quotation, “There’s no reason to subject workers to an election.” Employees of hotels near the L.A. airport typically earn only minimum wage—$6.75 an hour—or a little above that and must pay for their own health insurance, leaving many workers uninsured. According to the Los Angeles Times, many of the workers turn to local church food banks to feed their children. UNITE HERE, which represents hotel, restaurant, and garment workers, is leading the drive to unionize these workers and has asked hotel owners to honor a card check process rather than insist on an arduous election. While elections open the door to employer coercion and lengthy bureaucratic challenges, card check is a simple process in which a majority of workers choose to unionize by signing a card. So who ran the inflammatory ad? That’s right—Rick Berman’s anti-labor Center for Union Facts. The card check system, which requires management consent, has been enormously successful, used to sign up about 70 percent of the private-sector workers who joined unions in 2005, or 150,000 people— including 16,500 at cell phone company Cingular, who joined CWA. Labor unions are now lobbying for a bill, the Employee Free Choice Act, which would allow card check even without the employer’s consent. Berman told the Boston Globe that the growing success of card check was the motivating force behind his decision to found the Center for Union Facts. The quote Berman used in the ad was pulled from remarks Raynor made in support of card check. Berman claims that unions “want to force people to join” and uses ads like these to denounce card check as coercive and antidemocratic. In fact, the reverse is true. The outcome of a secret ballot election is decided by a majority of those who happen to vote—while card check requires a majority of all employees to sign cards. In NLRB-supervised elections, 75 percent of companies hire union-busting consulting firms and 25 percent of companies illegally fire pro-union activists, according to a 1999 Cornell University study. That’s why unions win so few elections. But a March 2006 academic study commissioned by American Rights at Work found that such intimidation is far less common with card check. Workers report that management is less coercive in card check elections (23 percent report versus 46 percent with ballot elections) and pressure to join the union is even lower (only 14 percent of workers reported union such pressure). Card check creates an environment where workers can more freely decide whether or not to unionize. And when their choice is free, workers tend to choose a union—exactly what Berman is afraid of.