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.