[...] In the postwar furor, business leaders characterized unions as fat, greedy, corrupt, and decidedly un-American. They demanded that Congress amend the Wagner Act, complaining that the law gave unions an insurmountable advantage over management. Executives charged that by protecting unions, but not management, from improper practices during organizing drives and elections, the Wagner Act allowed unions to be coercive, to threaten, and to intimidate workers at will. They just wanted to level the playing field. In 1947 Congress bowed to management's wishes. After a prolonged and stormy debate, conservative Congressmen won passage of a sweeping labor reform law, overriding the veto by President Harry S Truman, who condemned the law as designed primarily to weaken unions. Commonly referred to as the Taft-Hartley Act, the 1947 law attacks unions on almost every front. To this day union leaders consider the Taft-Hartley Act a primary cause of labor's failure to organize the majority of American workers. Among the law's most significant provisions are the establishment of unfair labor practices that can be charged against unions; a listing of specific "employer rights" available to management during union-organizing efforts, including a broad freedom of expression; an outright ban on the closed shop, in which union membership is a precondition of employment; and an open invitation to states to pass even more restrictive legislation. One provision, since removed from the law, required union officers to file affidavits proclaiming that they had no affiliation to the Communist party. Taft-Hartley was devastating to labor. It led to a proliferation of state legislation disingenuously called "right to work" laws, which prohibit mandatory union dues; perpetuated the red baiting that already haunted the labor movement; and loaded management's union-busting arsenal with complicated restrictions on fundamental union activities. Executives and their consultants knew that with the Taft-Hartley amendments in place, employers would enjoy freedom in combating worker organizations. Management always had the upper hand, of course; they had never lost it. But thanks to Taft-Hartley, the bosses could once again wage their war with near impunity.

[...] By 1957 organized labor seemed so rife with corruption that the Senate appointed a special subcommittee to investigate allegations of criminal activities. The committee, headed by Senator John McClellan of Arkansas, boasted such lofty membership as John F. Kennedy, then a young senator from Massachusetts, and had as its chief counsel a youthful Robert F. Kennedy. The televised hearings stunned Americans with its revelations of rigged union elections, collusion of union leaders and employers, embezzlement, and theft. One of the chief targets of the Senate investigations was the Teamsters union, and the committee found evidence of corruption at nearly every level, up to the international president, Dave Beck. Beck had been elected president of the Teamsters in 1952 on a promise to clean up the union. But five years later witnesses testified before the McClellan Anti-Racketeering Committee that Beck was diverting large amounts of union funds for his own purposes, misappropriations that included payments to Labor Relations Associates. Largely as a result of the hearings, Beck was convicted of tax evasion and grand larceny; his successor, the notorious Jimmy Hoffa, was convicted and jailed for jury tampering and mail fraud; and the Teamsters union was expelled from the AFL-CIO.

In 1961, two years after Labor Relations Associates dissolved in shame, Shefferman published a book entitled The Man in the Middle, a 292-page justification of his four decades in anti-union employee relations work. In the book Shefferman whines a great deal about his treatment before the McClellan Committee and defends his work ad nauseam. His key defense lay in his claim that union avoidance constituted "a tiny percentage" of his labor relations work. By way of illustration, he cites a laundry list of other personnel services he provided, as reported by one client to the McClellan Committee. The list included the administration of opinion surveys, supervisor training, incentive pay procedures, wage surveys, employee complaints, personnel records, application procedures, job evaluations, and legal services. The other services were rendered, to be sure. But the truth is, if union busting was part of the work, then the entire package was tainted. Everything else had to be performed in concert with the overall goal of keeping top management in complete control. Every other piece of a company's employee relations work had a part in that drama. To borrow a line from Shefferman's own book: "So we find that even the hidden thread is basic to the fabric of labor-management relations."

But the loopholes in Landrum-Griffin are shameful-enormous, gaping errors in the law that have left room for a sleazy billion-dollar industry to plod through without even sucking in its bloated middle. The law states that management consultants only have to file financial disclosures if they engage in certain kinds of activities, essentially attempting to persuade employees not to join a union or supplying the employer with information regarding the activities of employees or a union in connection with a labor relations matter. Of course, that is precisely what anti-union consultants do, have always done. Yet I never filed with Landrum-Griffin in my life, and few union busters do. Here's why not: According to the law, in order to be considered engaging in "persuader " activities, the consultant must speak directly to the employees in the voting unit. As long as he deals directly only with supervisors and management, he can easily slide out from under the scrutiny of the Department of Labor, which collects the Landrum-Griffin reports.

So just what does John Sheridan Associates do? I wanted to know. "We do the Lord's work," was Sheridan's answer. I was electrified as Sheridan and Bannon described their business, and I found myself seduced into coveting the job. "We force management to clean up its act," Bannon announced. "Our job is to thwart union-organizing drives. You see, a union-organization effort only results from one thing: bad management. If the employees are pushing to organize a union, the management only has itself to blame." To that synopsis Sheridan added a cynical refrain that has served as a mantra of sorts to union busters for a generation: We're not anti-union. We're pro-company and pro-employee." Bannon ticked off a list of the five key corporate failings that drive workers to seek union help: lack of recognition, weak management, poor communication, substandard working conditions, and noncompetitive wages and benefits. If a company takes care of those problems itself, Bannon said, it could achieve a happy work force and never have to fear a union invasion. So what John Sheridan Associates do is first take care of the immediate threat, the crisis, by quelling the union-organizing drive. With the union trouble put to rest, the consultants then teach management how to run the company so that employees will not feel they need a union. "In our work, we use the threat of the union to force management to change its ways, to supervise more effectively, communicate better with the workers. We humble management, make them see how they've called the union trouble upon themselves. When our work is done, the company remains union free because no union is needed. Management does its job right, the workers are happy, and the company is profitable."

The key to Sheridan Associates lay in the firm's first commandment: Never win too big or too fast. A quick campaign only meant that the client got off cheap, Sheridan reminded us again and again. A big win was worse. Enthusiastic young consultants like myself liked to trounce the union, thus proving our prowess and, we figured, our worth to the company. But Sheridan frowned on landslides. To him, a lopsided election only meant the loss of a client. NLRB statistics showed that if a union won at least 30 per cent of the vote, half the time it would return for a second organizing attempt, usually within a year. That could mean yet another counter-organizing job for Sheridan. To Jack, then, the closer the vote count the better. If the company barely squeaked by the union, he lectured, corporate execs would be convinced that the consult ants had been necessary and would pay their bill gratefully. What's more, they would be likely to purchase a few months' worth of Sheridan's postelection management training package and call on Sheridan in the case of a renewed union attack. On the other hand, a big victory could start the company men wondering if they could have just as easily won the fight themselves. Maybe the union never had a chance, they would think, in which case Sheridan's bill for $60,000 would be pretty hard to swallow. "Don't kick the union 's ass," was Sheridan 's refrain. To do our job right, then, we had to beat the union and make it look hard.

"Union busters wield great power through their program of terror and manipulation—people don't, can't possibly know what's going on and who's telling the truth. You have to appreciate that most of the people [at a workplace] are just regular people. They in their lives have no experience with violence, with being lied to, with manipulation, with being harassed in open, gross, insulting ways. The first time this program happens to regular people, they're terrified. Their fondest wish after a few months of this is that it would just go away and go back to being like it was. The union busters know this. None of this is intellectual at all. It works on the gut."

It was a timely dream. The once floundering culinary union had become increasingly aggressive over the previous three years, since naming the politically cunning Edward T. Hanley, a forty-year-old former bartender and labor leader from Chicago, as general president. It was Hanley who, in 1975, the year I met Lane, had directed the merger of the culinary union with the hotel and bartenders unions to create a force capable of taking on the rich and powerful owners of the nation's largest hotel and restaurant chains. The next year Hanley's new improved union was to play a lead role in a five-union strike against fifteen Las Vegas hotel-casinos, which virtually shut down the city's famed strip for more than two weeks during the crucial spring tourist season and cost the businesses an estimated $150 million.

In years past the culinary union had been considered sluggish and ineffective; membership numbers showed that the union was losing ground even as the number of service jobs in the United States exploded. Between 1963 and 1973, the percentage of restaurant workers belonging to unions had dropped from more than 25 percent to 15 percent. But Hanley's 1976 Las Vegas performance would show that such numbers didn't tell the whole story. Even before Hanley's rise to power, unionism wasn't as crippled as restaurant management people thought. In fact, union member ship was growing; it was just that hotels, restaurants, and bars were opening faster than the union could organize, so the percentage of culinary workers that belonged to unions remained small. With the Hanley presidency came a change in the way the culinary union operated, a change having to do with the political and financial clout the savvy young leader brought to the organization. During his first years in office, Hanley greatly increased the culinary union's organizing budget and heightened the organization's political profile with handsome contributions to sympathetic electoral candidates.

The advantages of union organization were clear to many, but labor unions had been built by and for blue-collar workers in industry and the building trades, and until the 1960s they didn't reach much farther. Then, in a dramatic shift that gained momentum throughout the 1970s, organized labor began seeping into business offices, fire departments, county hospitals, and public school classrooms. White-collar employees and public servants of all sorts joined unions in record numbers, making up the fastest-growing segment of the labor movement in the 1970s. Between 1968 and 1978 union membership among public employees tripled, to more than two million. Another two million public employees belonged to once sleepy professional associations that, m the previous decade, had been transformed into aggressive labor organizations.

The enlistment of the white-collar workers into the union ranks substantially upped the stakes of the war on labor. Business leaders knew they needed to send more troops to the front, and they justified the deployment with a recitation of the dangerous schisms in U.S. economy, things like the cost of the Vietnam War, foreign competition, plant closures, high inflation, the energy crises, recession, and growing unemployment. All that ravaged the American worker, of course, but it was American business that went crying and gnashing its teeth to Congress. The problem, our corporate captains wailed, was the damn cost of labor. Business leaders from all sectors organized to "control labor costs"—meaning cut people's pay—initially in the construction industry. Our illustrious executives focused on construction because, they alleged, high wages in the building trades translated into high-cost construction, which meant high-cost everything that came after—the age-old "ripple effect" as applied to anti-unionism. To invert the argument, then, if business could successfully undermine unions in the building and construction trades, it could well defeat the whole of organized labor. They were shooting for the moon.

So the unions won a round—but very belatedly and only by a hair. That same year the mighty Chrysler Corporation declared itself on the brink of bankruptcy and appealed to President Jimmy Carter for an emergency bailout loan. The taxpayer loan was granted, but only under the condition that the labor unions representing Chrysler employees, primarily the United Auto Workers, agreed to substantial cuts in pay and benefits. Determined to preserve jobs, the UAW conceded; from the Chrysler bailout deal, then, was born the "concession bargaining" system that still dominated union contract talks a decade later.