Breaking Unions With the Language of Diversity and Social Justice
June 7 2022
JOHN MERRELL, speaking in a southern drawl, apologized for presenting over Zoom in such casual attire. The lack of a jacket and tie, he said, was intentional. He was on-site with a client.
“I figured this group would appreciate as much as any that you know, when you’ve got a lawyer in your facility, you usually don’t want them to come in looking all lawyered up,” said Merrell, a management labor attorney at the firm Ogletree Deakins, a South Carolina-based law firm that specializes in closely advising businesses on how to counter union organizing drives. “I’m trying to be somewhat incognito.”
The group had gathered to speak candidly about creative new ways in which employers can subtly counter union organizing. There’s a “huge uptick in activity,” Merrell began, not just at name brand companies like Starbucks, but union drives “even in the Carolinas where [I am] based, we’re seeing a lot of an uptick of activity in some kind of unexpected places, unexpected industries, not the industries that you typically think of as being your unionized industries.”
Continues: https://theintercept.com/2022/06/07/union-busting-tactics-diversity/