There are many forms of union busting. Some labor consultants, and attorneys take on unions that already represent a work force, squeezing negotiators at the bargaining table, forcing workers out on strike, harassing union officers. My career took another path. I refined the Sheridan specialty called "counter-organizing drives," battling non-union employees as they struggled to win union representation. The enemy was the collective spirit. I got hold of that spirit while it was still a seedling; I poisoned it, choked it, bludgeoned it if I had to, anything to be sure it would never blossom into a united work force, the dreaded foe of any corporate tyrant.

For my campaigns I identified two key targets: the rank-and-file workers and their immediate supervisors. The supervisors served as my front line. I took them hostage on the first day and sent them to anti-union boot camp. I knew that people who didn't feel threatened wouldn't fight. So through hours of seminars, rallies, and one-on-one encounters, I taught the supervisors to despise and fear the union. I persuaded them that a union-organizing drive was a personal attack on them, a referendum on their leadership skills, and an attempt to humiliate them. I was friendly, even jovial at times, but always unforgiving as I compelled each supervisor to feel he was somehow to blame for the union push and consequently obliged to defeat it. Like any hostages, most supervisors could not resist for long. They soon came to see the fight through the eyes of their captor and went to work wringing union sympathies out of their workers.

In 1975 I left the employ of consulting firms and set out on my own. Over the next eight years I ran a series of one-man union-busting enterprises I called by such disingenuous names as Employee Synthesis Program and Human Resources Institute, and I struck it rich. But by 1983 I had become hopelessly alcoholic; the addiction had badly complicated my life, and solo work was taking its toll on me. I landed a counter-organizing job at an Ohio coal company five hundred workers strong, and I decided I needed backup. I called on some former colleagues from a Sheridan spin off called Modern Management Methods and invited them to join me as I feasted off the carcass of the United Mine Workers. They did, gleefully, and my reaffiliation with MMM continued until the death of my shameful career.

To stop a union proponent - a "pusher," in the anti-union lexicon - the buster will go anywhere, not just to the lunch room, but into the bedroom if necessary .The buster not only is a terrorist; he is also a spy. My team and I routinely pried into workers' police records, personnel files, credit histories, medical records, and family lives in search of a weakness that we could use to discredit union activists.

Once in a while, a worker is impeccable. So some consultants resort to lies. To fell the sturdiest union supporters in the 1970s, I frequently launched rumors that the targeted worker was gay or was cheating on his wife. It was a very effective technique, particularly in blue-collar towns. If even the nasty stories failed to muzzle an effective union proponent, the busters might get the worker fired.

Many consultants have given up union busting and quietly gone about building more honorable careers for themselves, sort of like former Nazis moving to America and setting up flower shops. Not I. At the time I made my conversion, I was struggling to overcome alcoholism. In my pursuit of recovery I also sought redemption, so I came to believe it was my moral duty to confront what I had done and somehow to make amends to my tens of thousands of victims. At that moment I vowed I would do whatever I could to stop the others in my trade from carrying out their hateful mission. I would not run and hide.

I first met Cravat Coal on paper. One hot August day in 1983, I sent the paralegal student who worked as my assistant to the National Labor Relations Board office in downtown Cleveland to poke through the filings. That was the method I had developed to generate work during slow times. It turned out to be a brilliant tactic, for of ten I discovered a union-organizing drive before company executives had any suspicions. The timeliness of my call made it impossible to ignore, and the chief executives' panic allowed me to suggest that, having caught the trouble early, we could launch our offensive while the union was still struggling to develop a strategy. That, in fact, was the case with Cravat. My student-assistant had discovered a union representation petition that had been filed just a day before by the United Mine Workers District 6, based in Wheeling, in neighboring West Virginia. The UMWA aimed to organize the 485 miners at what was then the nation's largest independent coal-mining company.

Our first legal move, then, was to petition the National Labor Relations Board in Cleveland to expand the UMWA voting unit to include all Cravat workers. Leiken was an opaque, colorless personality, but when it came to forming legal arguments, he was a genius. The UMWA, although it used a seasoned attorney, was caught unprepared for the kind of sophisticated maneuver of which Leiken was capable. The attorneys sat through a daylong hearing before an NLRB officer, which was held in the city clerk's office in St. Clairsville, a town about fifteen miles south of Cadiz and only slightly larger. Witnesses for both sides spent much of the time sitting on benches outside the city building, eating pizza and waiting to be called. The lawyers then submitted their briefs to the NLRB regional director and a waited a decision. The beauty of such legal tactics is that they are effective in damaging the union effort no matter which side prevails. Our petition to expand the Cravat voting unit was filed two weeks into the campaign, and the case took at least three weeks to resolve. That kind of delay steals momentum from a union-organizing drive, which is greatly dependent on the emotional energy of its leaders and the sense of urgency among workers. By dragging a union through the plodding legal system, we showed workers that the labor organization was sluggish and inefficient, certainly not the quick fix they might have hoped it would be.

I moved in closer. "You love your wife?" "Yes, sir."

"You sleep with your wife?"

The man blushed. "Uh, yes, sir."

"Well," I continued, "how would you like it if your mother-in-law slept between you and your wife every night?"

The crowd broke out in laughter, and a voice from the back of the room hooted, "Not bad. You should see his mother-in-law." Well, maybe you're lucky, I told the boy, but most of us wouldn't want our mother-in-law in bed with us. That's what it will be like for you if we let the union in; everything you do or say to your employees will have to be cleared through the mother-in-law, the union steward.

So what could the foremen do about the union threat? It was time for a lesson in law. I walked to the back of the basement room and picked up the legal pad on which the miners had signed their names. I handed the tablet to the miner sitting nearest me and announced that everyone should make sure he had signed the paper. While the tablet was being passed up and down the aisles, I distributed copies of a federal government guide to the National Labor Relations Act. The fact that the booklet was a government publication was not serendipitous. It is crucial for the union buster to establish that what he is doing is sanctioned, even promoted to a certain extent, by the U.S. government. The labor law guide spelled out what an employer could and could not legally do to thwart a union-organizing attempt. The booklet would teach the miners the limits of the law, and I would tell them how to bend and even break those limits.

Once a union voting unit is established and the election date is set, federal labor law requires the employer to provide the union with the names and home addresses of all eligible employees. That law, which grew out of a 1966 U.S. Supreme Court decision, was intended to give unions easier access to the employees they are attempting to organize. But a good union buster knows how to pervert the intent. When I prepared the list (called the Excelsior list, for the company Excelsior Underwear, Inc., involved in the landmark court ruling), I did so meticulously: I provided the minimum information legally required while withholding enough derails to frustrate union officers in their hunt for employees. I never included first names, for example, only the first initial. I listed the employee's house number and street, as required, but always was sure to leave out apartment numbers and street designations such as Street, Avenue, Drive, or Place. I never included zip codes. Such a skeletal list guaranteed that some employees would not be found and that the union would rake an inordinately long time finding others. To top off the sabotage, I sent a letter to every employee on the list before releasing their names to the union. In the letter, which was signed by company management, I informed employees that we had given out personal information on them to the union as required by law and assured them that we would never have given out such information otherwise. The letter went on to warn the workers to expect harassing phone calls and visits from union officials at their homes. Management apologized, of course, for the trouble the union drive was causing the good workers. I prepared Cravat's Excelsior list and warning letter according to the formula. Working in tandem with the expansion of the voting unit, the ploy was particularly effective. The union-organizing process was contaminated from the beginning.

[...] Among employers there grew a great demand for expertise in the tricks of what was called "union avoidance." All that was needed were a few good capitalists ready to tap that burgeoning market, and a whole new industry was born.

The first nationally known management consulting firm that specialized in helping companies evade unions was Labor Relations Associates of Chicago, Inc. Labor Relations Associates was formed in 1939, just two years after the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the Wagner Act and ordered its full implementation. The firm was founded by a veteran personnel man named Nathan Shefferman, a member of the original National Labor Relations Board in 1934, who a year later became director of employee relations at Sears, Roebuck & Co. Today perhaps few people recognize the name Shefferman. But when Shefferman's company folded in 1959 after twenty years in business, his name and that of his firm had become forever linked with the more shameful elements of organized labor. That year, Shefferman was charged with conspiring to help Teamsters president Dave Beck avoid paying income taxes.