Tricks #1-3: We Didn’t Realize You Were so Dissatisfied / Give Us a Chance / We are Always Open to Discussion
Once workers start organizing, management often claims they didn’t realize their employees were so upset. They paint the situation as a giant misunderstanding, one that, with their newly heightened powers of perception, they’re committed to fixing, or at least talking about.
At Hudson in particular, these claims are hollow. As employees, we’ve been sending petitions and openly engaging in collective actions for months. Our claims are clearly articulated in innumerable signed statements, both collective and individual and which stretch back for years. Management has had plenty of time to recognize our concerns and discuss these concerns with us, though they’ve steadfastly refused to at every point. Of course, the company’s owners have also been in Taiwan since the pandemic began and, even when they were in the States, our coworkers report that they only went to the office a handful of times each week. If that’s the case, maybe they really didn’t know what was going on or have any ability to talk about it, though this would be entirely their fault.
Regardless of how aware management was of our working conditions or how newly willing they are to discuss things with us, it was their decisions that brought the company to this point. Whether through willful malice or simply gross incompetence, management has steered the ship to the where it is now and there’s no reason to believe they would choose a different course given another chance. After all, they set the wages, decided which benefits they’d bestow on us, and chose the days we would (and more often wouldn’t) have off since the very beginning. It’s time for us to have a say. Forming a union is how we get our voices heard at the table.
Tricks #4-6: You’re Fired / We’ll Replace You with Contractors / We’ll Outsource Your Job
After employees begin organizing, many bosses threaten to fire their employees, close the business down, or replace the employees with scab contractors or overseas workers. All of these actions are illegal. In fact, under the National Labor Relations Act – the overarching law governing labor relations in the United States – just threatening to take these actions is illegal. That said, management is engaged in a routine pattern of lawlessness that includes discriminating against female employees and improperly compensating some employees for training, so they may make these threats anyways.
Nevertheless, management assuredly won’t take your job away and they definitely won’t close the company. The company’s owners make millions of dollars a year in profit off of Hudson Legal and they won’t give up that money just to spite us. Furthermore, they rely on us, the workers, to keep their cash cow going. Firing us wouldn’t leave anyone left to do these jobs, which would endanger management’s income stream. Closing the business would hurt their wallets even more.
Even if management did illegally retaliate against you in any way (and please let us know if they try), we have your back. The second management tries to touch a hair on your head is the second we kick into overdrive, using all the resources at our disposal to protect you. This includes both legal resources and the strength of our collective action, which has already been demonstrably effective.
All of that said, it’s important to realize that these protections only exist because we’re organizing. Outside the context of our collective action, management can fire you at will or ship as many jobs overseas as they want. The only exception is when we have a union contract that guarantees our employment and secures our positions at Hudson. In other words, the union is the only real solution to outsourcing, either at home or abroad.
Tricks #7 & 8: You have excellent working conditions / Your Requests are Unreasonable
Naturally, management feels that current conditions at Hudson are fair. After all, right now the benefits go to them at the top, which is an awfully nice place to be. Meanwhile, more and more shit roles downhill, where management isn’t but where we conveniently are to catch if for them. Put simply, everything is working great for management and they don’t really care how it’s working for us.
Our demands aren’t radical. If anything, they’re too reasonable. That’s because we don’t want to stop the company from growing or management from making money. All we want is to have secure employment in which we’re fairly compensated and aren’t subject to the whims of out-of-touch owners and their out-of-touch executives. At the moment, however, we don’t have any of this. Instead, we’re paid wages that are far below national averages for people in our positions, overly burdensome workloads, and meager benefits that, for many of us, don’t exceed what’s legally mandated for all employers to provide in our locales. To change this, we need to unionize.
Trick #9: We Don’t Overwork You, Bonuses and OT are Your Choice
Related to tricks 6 and 7 is trick 8, a sleight of hand that management pulls to make us think we’ve chosen to work overtime rather than been forced to do so. However, this sleight of hand doesn’t recognize the bigger picture.
To zoom out a bit, Hudson currently has 4 offices in the United States: Los Angeles (aka Pasadena), Chicago, Ann Arbor, and Pittsburgh. Regardless of which office you work in (or if you’re a remote worker), all Hudson employees start at $35,000 a year. Yet CNBC reports that living wages for LA and Chicago are respectively $66,000 and $59,000 a year, while the Economic Policy Institute’s living wage calculator shows that Ann Arbor and Pittsburgh residents respectively need around $38,500 and $33,000 to get by. If many of us make only half of a living wage for the city we live in, and even those of us in the cheapest region make just enough to live paycheck to paycheck, how are bonus projects (which are more or less the only way to earn extra income at Hudson) actually voluntary? The answer to this question: they aren’t; we’re systematically underpaid in order to force us to take on extra work under the pretense of volunteering for it. The answer to this problem: unionizing and collectively bargaining for fair wages and workloads.
Tricks #10 & 11: We Have Already Given You Concessions / We’ll Give You a Raise to Forget This
Our collective actions have already seen results. Since we began organizing, we’ve forced the company to increase their share of our insurance premiums, earned an extra paid day off, secured more than $18,000 in employer gift-matching to charities of our choice, and more. Moving forward, we expect management to point to these concessions as already being enough, or possibly upping them a bit and demanding we don’t ask for anything beyond that. These meager concessions and any we might receive in the future are just a red herring, though. Claire and Scott have offered them in an attempt to dissuade us from asking for more, mainly because management realizes that forming a union will get us much, much more than they’ve already offered. Furthermore, our victories aren’t secure until we have a union contract. Without this, anything we’re offered can be taken away. With it, anything we win becomes our right to have.
Tricks #12 & 13: Think of the Clients / A Union Would Compromise the Client-Lawyer Relationship
Many of us at Hudson believe in putting our clients first, and for good reason. From a business perspective, our clients are the life blood of the company. From a national perspective, our clients bring needed expertise to the country that helps solve many of the United States’ most challenging problems. And (most importantly) from a human perspective, we represent people confronting a callous government bureaucracy that has little sympathy for the human lives it affects and is primarily focused on trampling immigrants underfoot.
Unfortunately, management will likely try to weaponize our sympathy for our clients to break our union. To this end, we expect them to claim that our demands for fair wages and a just workplace will somehow hurt our clients. Management also might try to say that the special relationship between a lawyer and their clients is such that it prevents legal workers from unionizing. All of this is untrue.
For one, it’s unclear how paying us a fair wage or giving us adequate benefits would harm anyone. As far as we can tell, this would only improve our lives, possibly at the expense of Hudson’s profit margins but certainly not at the expense of our client’s interests. Indeed, many of the things we’re fighting for the hardest, like reasonable workloads and appropriate staffing levels, would actually benefit the people we represent. At the moment, our burdensome caseloads often prevent us from giving each case the attention it deserves. Reducing this workload would only free up more time to do the excellent job that our clients expect us to. Moreover, there’s nothing about the attorney client relationship that stops us from forming a union. We know this because we’re not the first law firm, or even the first immigration law firm, to unionize. Thus, anytime management tells you that a union would hurt our clients, know that its a tricky attempt to weaponize your real concern for the people we represent.
Trick #14 & 15: Unions are Great, but You Don’t Need One / Unions are Outdated in the Modern Economy
Especially if you live in a city with a long union tradition like Chicago, Pittsburgh, or Detroit, you probably know that unions are why we have things like weekends, the 8-hour work day, and the 40-hour work week. As a result, managers have to acknowledge that unions are good, at least in some cases. Because they have to at least partially recognize that unions help workers, managers often make claims about unions not being right for the company in question or out of place in our day and age, rather than outright state that unions are bad. Make no mistake, though, unions still play a vital role in all workplaces. Even after decades of attacks from bosses and some politicians, union members still make 20% more than non-union workers, have better benefits, and generally enjoy safer jobs with stronger job protections. Of course, to enjoy these benefits at Hudson, we need to make a union.
Tricks #16 & 17: You’ll be Starting from Scratch / We Don’t Have to Agree to a Union Contract
After winning our union vote we’ll begin a process called “collective bargaining.” In this process, we, as union members, will sit at the table with management as management’s equals and negotiate our workplace conditions with them. That said, Management doesn’t want to engage in this process. They’re happy with the current situation, in which they dictate conditions, rather than bargain over them.
To try to stop us from beginning these negotiations, management may try to convince you that we begin negotiating with nothing and have to haggle for everything we eventually get. They may also say that they just won’t sign any contract giving us more than we have already. This is simply untrue. When we begin a negotiating, we start with our current wages, benefits and working conditions and negotiate up from there. Furthermore, management is legally required to bargain in “good faith.” This means that management has to sign whatever contract we negotiate with them, regardless of how much they dislike it. After all, both us (as employees) and they (as managers) will be negotiating at the same table.
Trick #18: We Don’t Have the Money to Fulfill Your Requests / We Could Go Out of Business
Many managers try to argue that they can’t meet the union’s demands because they’re too strapped for cash. In their telling, meeting our demands would either wipe out their profits or bankrupt the company, both of which they find unacceptable. In Hudson’s case, we know that these claims aren’t true. According to multiple sources, each of whom independently and unprompted provided the same general numbers, Hudson Legal makes roughly 45% profit margins, amounting to about $90 million a year going straight into the owners’ pockets. In fact, assuming that Hudson has 200 employees making $45,000 a year (which is both more employees than work here and more money than the average employee makes), management could double everyone’s salary today and still make more than $80 million in profit annually. Clearly, then, the company makes more than enough money to both meet our demands and stay in business. Moreover, even if our sources are wrong, having a union puts us in a position to demand documentation showing that the company can’t meet our requests and gives us access to lawyers and accountants who can verify that these documents paint a picture of the company’s actual finances. In fact, forming a union is the only way we’ll ever know if management’s claims about their own poverty are true or just lies that management tells to temper our desires.
Tricks #19 & 20: We Only Negotiate Individually / You’ll Lose Your Right to Negotiate as an Individual
We already know management will pull at least one of these because they already have, so if “we only negotiate individually” is on your bingo card feel free to check it off. Of course, we also know that Hudson will negotiate collectively, both because they already have (in giving us Black Friday off, raising their share of our insurance premiums, etc.) and because, when we have a union, they’re legally required to do so.
As far as negotiating individually goes, they’re not wrong when they say a union will stop you from doing that. Its 100% true that our union will negotiate a collective bargaining agreement that applies to all of us. That said, you should keep in mind that you already had a chance to negotiate with management individually, both when you were hired and any time you asked for a raise. What did that get you? Probably a $35,000 salary and a lot of unanswered raise requests, since that’s certainly what it got everyone we’ve talked to. One person we talked to even asked for a raise and was offer a decrease in pay instead. In point of fact, the only time we’re aware that anyone has gotten above what management’s offered is through group bargaining via collective action. Thus, our experience, and the experiences of every worker in America, shows that collective bargaining is much more effective than individually negotiating if you want better wages, benefits, or working conditions.
Trick #21: A Union Would Cut Management Out of Decision Making
Managers everywhere like to claim that unions cut management out of decision making. However, what they’re really saying is that unions prevent managers from being the sole decisionmakers. That’s because unions give workers an equal voice in making decisions that impact their working conditions. In this case, management isn’t actually complaining about themselves being cut out, they’re complaining about us being cut in.
Trick #22: Union Rules Will Restrict our Flexibility
Having a union will absolutely restrict management’s flexibility to make decisions. Namely, it will restrict their flexibility to fire us without warning, to change our workloads without our approval, and to make other decision that impact us without consulting us first. These restrictions on management’s flexibility might hamper their ability to dictate what we do all day, but they’ll improve our quality of life.
Trick #23: You’ll Have to Pay Dues
Union dues are small fees that union members pay to cover the costs of legal representation and union organizing. We expect that management will bring up union dues a lot, likely to frame them as overly burdensome taxes on our wages. This framing couldn’t be further from the truth, though. United Electricalworkers dues are equal to 2.5 hours of work per month, period. That means that if you were paying dues now, they would cost around $50 a month for most Hudson employees. The flip side of this is that unionizing puts us in a position to substantially improve our pay, benefits, and working conditions in ways that are far more valuable than $50. Moreover, we don’t pay any union dues until we’ve signed a contract, a contract that we vote on before it’s signed. Since it’s inconceivable that we’d ratify a contract which makes us less money than we already are making (after all, would you vote to earn less?), union dues are nothing to be afraid of.
Trick #24-26 Unions are Greedy / Unions are Antagonistic and Violent / We’re a Family Here
If you listen to managers talk about unions too much, you may come away with the impression that unions are third-parties who don’t care about their members but instead exist to harvest dues, disrupt harmonious workplaces, and sour relations between workers and management. Of course, even the least observant person can see that the union isn’t what’s caused tension at Hudson. That would be management, who have overworked, underpaid, and generally treated us as replaceable cogs in a machine that enriches them at our expense.
Regarding the union, the bottom line is that the United Electricalworkers is run by its members. Union policies are decided on by the members through democratic procedures that give everyone a say. Dues are spent according to the members’ directives. People employed by the union itself are the members’ (i.e. our) employees. And the union was brought into Hudson by us, Hudson’s employees, to give us advice as we strove to create a more perfect workplace. When we ratify the union through an election, all we’re doing is empowering ourselves to have a say in our workplace and gaining access to the wealth of experience and knowledge that the union has on staff. In short, the union is here for us precisely because Hudson isn’t a family – it’s a company – and its goal is not to create problems but to help us solve the ones that are already here.
Trick #27: You May be Forced to Strike
Strikes are a form of collective action that union members use to gain leverage in negotiations and to fix problems on the job. In reality, the people most afraid of strikes are management, who don’t want workers asserting their rights or taking actions that lose managers money. As a result, it’s ironic that managers try to scare workers by saying that the union will force you out on strike.
As with everything about the union, decisions about striking are made democratically. You have a say in whether or not we strike, as does every other employee at Hudson. Furthermore, no one can or will make you go on strike if you don’t want to. Indeed, many of us have been on a boost project and/or overtime strike for several months now. Participation in this, like participation in every other kind of strike, is wholly up to you. While your participation helps us build and maintain a strong union and we encourage you to take part in every collective action, we won’t make you do so, just as we haven’t made you refuse overtime.
Trick #28: This Will Take Time to Work Out
Just to be straight forward, this will indeed take some time to work out. As it stands, we need to have a union election and then go through collective bargaining before we win a contract. This involves dealing with both the government and a thus far intransigent management team so, yes, this will take some time. And management may use the fact that this will take time to imply that it won’t be worth it in the end. And it’s this implication that’s meant to talk you out of doing it at all.
That this will take time is entirely Claire and Scott’s fault. If they choose to recognize the union now, we’re more than happy to draft a contract and present it for people to vote on in a matter of weeks. Of course, we’re under no illusion that management will choose this route. Nevertheless, they are most certainly invited to sign whatever contract we present them without objection and without negotiation, just as they’ve always been able to fulfill the demands laid out in our various petitions.
Assuming that management doesn’t simply accede to our demands, then the time that this takes will certainly be worth it. As we’ve noted several times, union members (like we will be) have far better wages and working conditions than non-union members (like we are now). Given the success we’ve already seen through our collective action, we’re quite confident that the amount of time we put into this will be richly rewarded in the form of better wages, secure working conditions, and reasonable workloads.
Trick #29: You Wouldn’t Do This if the Owner was a White Man
Presumably, everyone at Hudson is committed to having a workplace free of racism, sexism, homophobia, and other things of that nature (if you aren’t, we’re not really interested in hearing about it). Unfortunately, it’s possible that management will ignore our commitment to treating everyone justly and claim that we have racist or sexist motivations for organizing. The worry that management will do this stems from a recent union drive that occurred at an immigration law firm in Massachusetts, where management made sure to bring out every manager of color on staff to make similar claims.
Rest assured, our organizing has nothing to do with Claire or Scott’s race or gender. In fact, one of the key things we’d like to address is the current pay disparity between men’s and women’s salaries at Hudson. Our goal is to create a workplace that’s open to and treats everyone equally, regardless of their race, gender, sexual orientation, or other personally identifying characteristics. The Hudson that currently exists doesn’t do this and we’re intent on righting this wrong.
Trick #30: Mandatory Anti-Union Lecture or Meeting
One of the most common anti-union tactics that managers use is the mandatory anti-union lecture or meeting, also called the “captive audience meeting.” These are meetings that you, as a Hudson employee, are forced to sit through and in which management pulls out all the stops described above, alongside any others they can think of. While there’s no way to get out of these meetings, it’s good to be aware of the tricks that management will use in them. This kind of awareness helps you keep your wits under the flurry of lies and mistruths that management is sure to tell you. Also, it’s always good to bring someone to the meeting with you, if you can. That way, you can process what you saw together and help yourselves separate fact from management fiction.
Trick #31: UE is Socialist
While the other tricks described above are used against almost every union, this one is United Electricalworkers specific – and takes a bit of explaining to understand.
In the 1950s, politicians and the press whipped up anticommunist sentiment across the US in order to convince Americans that the Soviet Union was an existential threat to the American way. As a union, we don’t have a collective position on whether this was right or wrong; it’s just something that happened quite a while ago. What’s important in this case is that the flurry of anticommunist sentiment led most American unions to expel their members who had ties (real or alleged) to the communist party. The United Electricalworkers chose not to do this on the grounds that the union represented all of its members, regardless of political affiliation. Ever since the UE made this choice, anti-union managers have been calling the union a group of commies and pinkos in order to convince workers to forfeit their collective bargaining rights.
To be clear, the United Electricalworkers is not, has never been, and never will be affiliated with any political party. The union’s sole purpose is to represent its members and carry out our directives. That’s why the union has only endorsed 7 candidates for president despite having existed for more than 22 presidential elections, and why all of these candidates had to win resounding member support before receiving the union’s endorsement (for example, UE’s most recent endorsement, of Bernie Sanders in 2019, was unanimously supported by democratically-elected union delegates to the UE’s national convention). In short, UE is not affiliated with any political party or ideology, only with its members. That’s how it’s always been and that’s how it always will be.