What is the cost of union busting? A CLN Member Contribution by Bob Funk, Executive Director, LaborLab.us

When workers at a hospital, university, or school start talking about forming a union, many employers hire outside “experts” to squash the effort. An industry of “union avoidance” consultants and law firms, worth an estimated $1.7 billion a year in the United States, exists to serve them. These specialists, paid hundreds of dollars an hour, run captive audience meetings, coach supervisors, and write the anti-union literature meant to sow fear and doubt, often without telling workers who they are or why they’re there. Congress identified this problem back in 1959 and required these arrangements be disclosed, calling the activity “reprehensible” and something that “should be exposed to public view.” But loopholes and weak enforcement have kept workers in the dark about who’s doing this work and what it costs.

Catholic employers are no exception, and some spend just as much as anyone else. Ascension Seton, founded in Austin, TX, by the Daughters of Charity in 1902, describes itself as a ministry of the Catholic Church. A federal report filed by its hospital in Kyle, TX, Ascension Seton Hays, shows it retained two consulting firms, Heightened Solutions and Bardi Education Services, on November 1, 2023, just over a week before nurse residents and fellows at Ascension Seton Medical Center in Austin filed to unionize with National Nurses United. The hospital paid the firms more than $160,000 through the end of that year to help management “communicate” with employees about their right to organize. The residents and fellows won their election anyway, voting 120 to 5, joining the staff RNs who had organized in 2022, and all of them ratified a first contract that March. A review of Department of Labor filings by National Nurses United found Ascension spent more than $1.2 million system-wide on anti-union consultants in 2023 alone.

And Ascension isn’t alone. Faculty unions at Catholic universities, including Boston College, Duquesne, St. Leo, Marquette, Loyola Marymount, and St. John’s, have watched their schools cite a religious exemption from federal labor law to stop bargaining. And nurses at SSM Health’s St. Mary’s Hospital in Madison, WI say they faced union-busting while organizing this year.

Unfortunately, federal filings like these only tell part of the story. They may show what an employer paid outside consultants, but not the added cost of attorney fees and the paid time managers spend on union-busting instead of their own jobs. LaborLab, a workers rights organization, built a free calculator to help fill in that picture. Run against the campaign to defeat the residents’ and fellows’ organizing drive, it estimates the hospital’s full effort cost between $486,000 and $602,000, or $2,200 to $2,700 per worker, well beyond the $160,000 in consultant fees it disclosed. Not all of that is money the hospital could simply redirect; much of it is staff and manager time pulled away from patient care rather than a check it could write elsewhere. But it’s a fuller picture of what workers are up against than any filing shows on its own. Workers in other campaigns can use the same tool to see the full size of that effort, instead of waiting a year for a partial picture to show up in a federal filing.

That’s the gap LaborLab’s tools are built to close. Alongside the calculator, our new union-buster search tool pulls together federal filings on more than 800 consultants, 8,000 law firms, and 21,000 attorneys, including who they work for and what they’re paid, where that’s disclosed. Workers can see the whole picture before a vote, not months after one. Since Rerum Novarum, the Church has taught that workers have a right to organize. Knowing who’s trying to talk them out of it, and what it’s costing to do so, helps them exercise that right freely.