Willful Ignorance as a Union-Busting Tactic

On the tricky—and sometimes overlooked—part of a union fight: negotiating a contract

Hi friends! Thanks for your support and for reading the newsletter! Here’s a button if you’d like to switch to a paid model:

Photo by Alexander Raissis on Unsplash

I first interviewed representatives of the Colectivo Collective in January 2021, a few months after they’d begun organizing. At that time, they were still fighting to be recognized by the leadership of Colectivo, a mini-chain of coffee shops with nearly 20 locations in Chicago, Milwaukee, and Madison. (I'm now based in Madison, although I was living in Chicago at the time of that interview.) The workers won their vote in August 2021, but it wasn’t until March 2022 that the vote was finalized following multiple challenges by Colectivo leadership. 

Most news stories about the Colectivo Collective stopped at that point, but that was just the start. The Colectivo Collective only ratified its first contract more than a year later, in June 2023—news that barely registered on my timeline or Google Alerts. 

Finalizing a contract is a paramount step in a union drive. Winning an initial vote to unionize is a big deal, but it isn’t until the union’s demands and requests are negotiated with management, and codified in a contract, that workers can begin to reap the benefits of union membership. And for employers, there is a lot of benefit to dragging out the contract negotiation process for as long as possible. 

At its most basic level, union organizing is a two-step process: You have to win your vote even to form a union, and then you have to negotiate with your employer to set mutually-agreed-upon employment standards. To me, it feels like much reporting on unions focuses on that first victory at the expense of the second. I think that's beginning to change, as the public becomes more familiar with union drives and stories of people organizing across sectors (from actors and writers to UPS workers)—but I also think we still miss a lot of the sneaky ways companies try to discourage union activity long after a vote has been won.

This week, I interviewed Clove Harrington and Razija Mehinovic of the Sunergos Union in Louisville, Kentucky. Sunergos Union workers won their vote in January 2023 and have yet to ratify a contract. Before I sat down to interview Clove and Razija, I searched the internet for articles about the union movement. But even as I researched, I couldn’t find a single statement from Sunergos leadership regarding the union. 

And so I checked out the company’s National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) page to see which high-powered, anti-union law firm they had likely called in to represent them—and was surprised that no law firm was listed (which is still the case as of the day I’m writing this, July 23). That’s despite the fact that leadership has gone to the negotiation table six times, according to the union representatives I spoke to.

These data points seemed weird to me, and we discussed more on the show: 

Ashley: Going back to the negotiations you folks have had and the fact that the Sunergos leadership has just hired lawyers, there seems to be some level of willful ignorance happening here. Like, “Oh, we don’t know what to do, and we just hired a lawyer,” which seems wild to me...

Razija: Yeah, 100%. When you can say that you’ve never done this before, you’ve never had to meet a negotiation table—it allows you to make quote unquote “mistakes” that we should somehow forgive.

Or if you’re not doing something correctly, that it’s not necessarily your fault...

And it just gets us right back to square one, where we’re like, “You should take us seriously. We are not just children sitting in front of you, you are not our parents giving us life advice. We are your employees. You are our boss, and we are demanding things of you. And it’s your responsibility to meet us where we’re at and to accept whatever—not even necessarily accept our demands, but to listen to our demands and respect that we are autonomous employees.”

We know some employers will utilize both legal and illegal anti-union tactics if their employees are unionizing—but after winning a union vote, employers and union representatives are supposed to “bargain in good faith.” The NLRB has a page explaining exactly what that means, but as you can imagine, a standard based primarily on intent rather than concrete action is difficult to uphold. 

There are actions that the NLRB defines as violations of the “bargaining in good faith” clause, like “fail[ure] to meet with the union at reasonable times and reasonable intervals” or “fali[ure] to bargain in good faith concerning mandatory subjects of bargaining.” But there doesn’t seem to be a standard to prove that other techniques are attempts to stall or slow down the bargaining process. 

That’s why I found Sunergos leadership’s reaction (or lack thereof) so interesting, and why focusing on companies’ responses to union votes is critical. I can’t determine if any individual action is a bad-faith technique—that’s for the NLRB to decide. But it strikes me that because much of our attention dissipates once a union achieves its initial victory, actions designed to stall contract negotiations get missed. 

But we are getting better at spotting stalling tactics! More and more media outlets are catching on to Starbucks’ aggressively slow pace and inability to meet with union representatives to ratify a contract. As of this writing, 316 stores have unionized, and not a single one has a contract in place—but the public at least seems to be critical enough to know that this is likely due to corporate ownership wishing to draw this process out for as long as possible, not only as a way to delay implementing structures that benefit workers but, even more insidiously, to deter others from attempting to organize. 

Stalling negotiation talks isn’t just a logistical tactic but a psychological one, meant to break the spirits of those participating in union negotiations and instill fear in onlookers who might dare to consider unionization. As Sen. Bernie Sanders said in his opening statement during a congressional hearing on Starbucks’ alleged anti-union tactics: 

“...what is outrageous to me is not only Starbucks’ anti-union activities and their willingness to break the law, it is their calculated and intentional efforts to stall, to stall, and to stall. They understand that the turnover rate … is high. They understand that if workers do not see success in gaining a contract, they are going to get discouraged and give up the fight. In a time when we want … for people to stand up and fight for their rights, to try and destroy the spirit of thousands and thousands of people who are fighting for justice, that, to my mind, is unforgivable.”

So what’s the answer here? To pay attention to the second part of a union fight—and to keep applying pressure to leaders refusing to budge, either through avoidance or willful ignorance. Keep asking questions, keep engaging with workers. Here’s the advice Clove gives on how to support the Sunergos Union: 

“...we have an Instagram account, it’s @sunergosunion, and you’ll find a link to the community support petition on there. Anything that customers can do just to show that they support what we’re doing. I mean, call the store, ask to talk to upper management if you want. Tell them you support what we’re doing.”