ONE MAJOR CORPORATION STOOD OUT for its lasting contribution to the development of professional union busting: the retail giant Sears, Roebuck. Sears had always fought its workers’ attempts to unionize, but the NLRA made it considerably trickier when it outlawed overt intimidation by management, like firing workers who wanted to unionize. In 1935, with the NLRA the new law of the land, Sears hired Nathan Shefferman as its human resources director with explicit instructions to fight unions tooth and nail despite the law. Shefferman turned the human resource department into a laboratory that developed cutting-edge union-avoidance strategies that remain central to the industry even now. Working with some of the top academic institutions of the era—including world-renowned behavioral psychologists at the University of Chicago, in addition to the industrial relations psychologists—they began experiments to predict which workers might be prone to join unions.

To pinpoint workers in the company who might want to unionize, management developed tools like employee-attitude surveys that allowed a human resources department to avoid violating the anti-spying provisions in the NLRA but still collect information on employee satisfaction or dissatisfaction. Employees would be fooled into believing the company was genuinely interested in their feedback, but these increasingly sophisticated surveys helped management weed out potential threats without violating the new labor laws. With the surveys, management developed a method to ascertain which workers they wanted to promote, which ones to surveil, and which to dispose of, lest the idea of workers deserving something better than wage slavery begin to spread.

Shefferman hooked his clients on the idea that the unscrupulous tactics required to keep, or make, companies union-free would best be done at arm’s length, so the companies would not be liable for the kind of illegal tactical warfare required to thwart a very natural human desire for their betterment. Despite LRA’s successes, and because there were still some members of Congress who were sympathetic to unions, some of Shefferman’s aggressive antiunion behavior, notably bribery and racketeering, was exposed by congressional investigations. By the late 1950s, LRA was forced to close. But the dozens of consultants who worked for LRA began to found their own union-avoidance firms, and those union buster names—Modern Management Methods (3M), the law firm Jackson & Lewis, and John Sheridan of John Sheridan Associates—are very familiar to organizers today.

Public-sector workers didn’t secure the right to collective bargaining until the civil rights movement made unionization a central issue. African Americans moved into government positions in large numbers on the heels of black veterans returning from World War II. And as the civil rights movement grew, so did the demand for unions in the public sector. At the big municipality level, New York City was the first to create a legal collective bargaining framework, in 1958. At the state level, Wisconsin was the first to grant state employees the right to collectively bargain in 1959. And in 1962, President John F. Kennedy signed an executive order giving federal government workers the right to collective bargaining inside their agencies. The main federal government workers’ union, the American Federation of Government Employees, grew from 71,000 members in 1961 to 301,000 by 1970.

The engineers were essentially functioning like a good union without officially being one. They came together as a team, collectively working out demands for management that mattered to them, in order to improve their quality of work life. The union they called told them if they privately signed union membership cards, it would give them better protections later if the employer tried to retaliate. Plus, they’d have the resources of the union, with its knowledgeable staff. On December 4, the majority of engineers sent a carefully written second letter, which said they had a right to organize and requested JG to honor their intention to form a union. After being uninvited to Winmore’s annual staff retreat, on January 26, every software engineer was fired in a mass termination.

Winmore tried to frame the firing as a layoff, which was a lie. That the tech workers were stunned by the firing is an understatement. Like Hesselgrave, they were highly skilled engineers who loved their work and their specific jobs—and for the most part, they liked their employer. In their mind, they were trying to help management overcome a lack of fair or effective systems. They felt as though they were working with management.

Despite the fierce individualist and competitive spirit among them, the first CEOs and executives in Silicon Valley were united about one innovation: being union-free. As far back as the 1970s, when Intel’s founder and CEO, Robert Noyce, decided to establish his new silicon-chip processor company across the country from his alma matter, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and its emerging high-tech corridor along Route 128 in Boston, it was explicitly to avoid the labor-management dynamics and unions from “back east.” In a 1983 Esquire biographical essay about Robert Noyce, author Tom Wolfe wrote, “He was the father of Silicon Valley!” Whether or not Noyce was “the” father, he was certainly a defining figure in the emerging world of corporate big tech, which was a direct outgrowth of the massive amounts of public taxpayer money that funded Noyce and many of his generation after the Soviet Union beat the United States into space in 1957 with the successful launch of Sputnik 1.

By the early 1970s, Noyce, already the equivalent of today’s multimillionaires, framed the narrative and set the example that companies like Winmore are still following in the second decade of the new millennium. He smashed early efforts by Intel engineers to unionize with several different labor organizations, including the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, the Teamsters, and the Stationary Engineers. According to Wolfe, “Noyce made it known, albeit quietly, that he regarded unionization as a death threat to Intel, and to the semiconductor industry generally. Labor management battles were part of the ancient terrain of the East. If Intel were divided into workers and bosses, with the implication that each side had to squeeze money out of the hides of the other, the enterprise would be finished.”

But in the 1970s many of the most successful companies in the United States were unionized, with CEOs in the auto, steel, and chemical industries, and others with incomes putting them in the top 1 percent. Noyce’s antipathy toward unions raises another question: Was he not content to be filthy rich and instead needed to make more than any other CEO, or was he ideologically opposed to unions and didn’t believe that the company’s rank and file were as valuable and crucial to its success as management? Or was it both, given that greed and the defense of inequality go together like integrated and circuit? We won’t ever know for sure, since he died in 1990 at age sixty-three. But judging from the case of the fifteen high-level engineers fired illegally by Winmore in 2018, whom we do know, and who were seeking simple things like clarity about paid time off, fair work rules, and better management systems, casting unions as a “death threat to the industry” was likely as absurd then as it is now.

Claims of “positive” automation today generally perpetuate similar myths about the impact of the washing machine: Leisure time will increase, fewer hours per worker will be needed, consumer prices will fall, people will consume more goods, and profits will rise. Pro-automation rhetoric posits that while automation has eliminated some jobs, don’t worry! It will create others. The problem is that the jobs that have been eliminated—in fact often prioritized for automation—are the very ones that have tended to be unionized, paying people a union wage, and the “new” jobs that get created are nonunion, low wage, no- to low-benefit jobs. The only other positive argument people make about robots and automation has to do with removing workers from dangerous environments. But it’s the actual environment itself, not just the workers, that can’t tolerate the industries that create those jobs, from cleaning out melting-down nuke plants to deep mining to chemical manufacturing. We don’t need to automate those jobs: we need to replace those industries with highly unionized clean energy.