WASHINGTON—The nation’s corporations spent $1.7 billion on union-busters last year—and that figure actually is an understatement.
A new report from LaborLab, which in turn mined the data it received from the Economic Policy Institute and from forms the Labor Department requires such “persuaders” to file, breaks down the sum into $1.5 billion for “union avoidance” law firms, who can charge up to thousands of dollars a day for their services, and $200 million more for “consulting fees.”
The understatement occurs for two reasons. One is straightforward: Though the union-busters must report to the U.S. Labor Department their expenses for services to companies, 57% of them leave the “fees” box on DOL’s required LM-20 form blank.
The second is a big loophole in the 1959 GOP-enacted Landrum-Griffin (Labor-Management Relations and Disclosure) Act. That law requires unions and union-sponsored organizations—such as central labor councils and health and welfare funds—to itemize and publicly post all their expenses down to the penny, covering everything from paychecks for their executive directors to paper clips.
Union-busters and corporations don’t have to be as specific as unions must. And if the union-busters just give “advice” to employers, they don’t have to report at all.
And since the “advice” often comes with a wink-wink-nod-nod from the union-buster about breaking labor laws and the weak penalties for doing so, a lot of union-buster spending escapes disclosure.
LaborLab, like EPI before it, paints a picture of a lucrative and burgeoning industry designed specifically to prevent workers from organizing to protect themselves, by unions or otherwise. LaborLab’s report on the union-busters, and interactive tools for workers, is at www.laborlab.us.
The “persuaders” fees start at $400 an hour per lawyer and spiral upwards into the thousands of dollars per hour and millions of dollars in spending. And firms hire union-busters to “advise” on how to battle workers in 71%-87% of organizing drives, depending on the industry involved.
The champion corporate spender last year against organizing was, of course, Amazon.
Owned by Jeff Bezos, one of the U.S.’s three richest people and who still controls most of the company’s Class I stock, Amazon shelled out $26.64 million to union-busters in 2025 alone.
It’s also been battling its 5,500 workers at its JFK1 warehouse on Staten Island, N.Y., for four years or more, ever since deaths and illnesses from the coronavirus pandemic, and Amazon’s refusal to share information drove them to vote in the independent Amazon Labor Union. ALU is now a semi-independent Teamsters sector.
Amazon, Elon Musk’s Tesla and SpaceX, and other firms are also funding an anti-National Labor Relations Board lawsuit, pending at the Trump-appointee-dominated Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans. It challenges the constitutionality of the NLRB and the act that created it.
There were three champion union-busting firms last year; a separate table from EPI shows, Labor Lab refers to that EPI data.
Los Angeles-based Littler Mendelson took more labor law cases as a percentage of its total business (5.7%) and had one of every six of its lawyers working on them. It garnered $58.6 million from them.
Littler Mendelson also got heavily involved in anti-worker referendums in California, notably the win by Uber, Lyft, and DoorDash overturning a state law which made their drivers “employees” eligible for unionizing, returning them to being “independent contractors.”
Ogletree-Deakins was second in percentage of labor cases as part of its total business (4%), but ahead of Littler in percentage of attorneys working on them (19.1%) and in revenue, $68.9 million. Jackson Lewis was third in all the categories: Labor case percentage (3.6%), share of attorneys working on them (14.2%), and revenue from them ($49.6 million).
And while the study does not make the point, for firms like Amazon, even union-buster fees of thousands of dollars a day cost less than the profits they would “lose” if they actually agreed to unionization and reached contracts with their workers.
What is unquantifiable, and not quantified, is that unionized firms have more productive workers, less turnover, and better morale, ultimately producing higher profits for bosses than their non-union counterparts. And those workers contribute proportionately more to the local and national economy.
LaborLab “is launching new tools to give workers a clearer picture of what they’re up against” when they try to organize, the non-profit organization said.
One feature of its site is a referral to an EPI chart of all the steps and tactics companies use to delay and deny unions from representing workers, even when workers triumph in union recognition votes.
The picture unions have painted over the years of a labor law obstacle course to actually getting a first contract, a course erected by the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act and subsequent National Labor Relations Board rulings and federal court decisions, is mild compared to all the steps on LaborLab’s chart.
And a calculator, using the per-hour charges by the union-busters, when available, plus how many hours they worked to stop particular unionizing drives, lets workers know how much corporate chieftains are willing to pay to stop workers in their tracks.
The calculator also lets workers know how much their bosses would have spent on raising their pay and benefits by recognizing and bargaining with the union to success, immediately after the recognition vote, rather than employing the union-buster.
LaborLab debuted its new tool, with all the information, including links to the forms union-busters are supposed to file, on September 8, the day after Labor Day 2026.
“Together, the tools help workers better understand, expose and push back against the specialists and resources mobilized by their employer to deny them a voice in the workplace,” it explains.
“These tools advance LaborLab’s vision of providing resources that can help directly empower workers to organize their workplaces,” said Bob Funk, its executive director.
One positive point in all the data: LaborLab reports not only do unions win an overwhelming majority of recognition votes, which has been the pattern for years, but union-busters vary in their success. Some can conjure tactics that halt organizing drives. Others fail often.
LaborLab’s tool presents those success and failure rates, too.
“We envision worker-organizers, union staffers and labor attorneys using the search tool to identify unions that previously dealt with a particular anti-union attorney or consultant, learn from their experience and share that information with other workers,” said Funk.
Organized labor’s solution to the problems its unionization drives face has been to rewrite labor law by removing the obstacles GOP lawmakers erected in 1947 with the Taft-Hartley Act—which virtually emasculated the original National Labor Relations Act of 1935—and the Landrum-Griffin Act of 1959.
Its vehicle is the Protect the Right To Organize (PRO) Act, which would outlaw tactics such as captive audience meetings. It also bans attempts, before and after an election, to alter the composition of the bargaining unit in the boss’s favor.
The PRO Act would also increase penalties for violating labor law and would give the NLRB more power and more incentive to go to court for injunctions against chronic law-breakers, such as Amazon, Starbucks, and the Block Brothers, who owned the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. They then shut the paper down rather than bargain a new contract, despite the NLRB’s injunction, with the News Guild of Pittsburgh.
The PRO Act, however, does not deal with the loopholes, such as the union busters not having to file for. In any case, the PRO Act is marooned on Capitol Hill, captive of a rabidly anti-worker GOP majority and a GOP President, Donald Trump, who hates unions.
This, in turn, has led some scholars to advise forgetting labor law reform altogether, and to mobilize the masses—the 71% of the country that supports unionization—and take to the streets to demand workers get their full rights and their fair share of the wealth their labor produces. Just as they did in the 1930s.
Because right now, the companies and their “persuaders” stand solidly in the way.
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