So-called “facts about unions” websites have become a staple of union-busting campaigns, recycling the same tired talking points from one employer to the next. Consultants and managers funnel workers to them through emails, text messages and handouts. The script is all too familiar: a union is a business that wants to trade away your benefits for dues deductions from your paycheck. Or that your employer deeply regrets being forced by law to share your phone number with the union.  (That employers themselves often closely monitor workers and collect personal information during anti-union campaigns — then use it to influence their votes, as in this case and this case — goes unmentioned.)

Bert Nash Mental Health Center recently fielded a website of this kind as part of an anti-union campaign that involved at least three consultants with the American Labor Group. The website featured: 

• Pages on topics including union cards (the union “may misrepresent what signing a card means”), collective bargaining (“you could end up with more, the same or less”) and strikes (“members who work during a strike may be subject to internal discipline…”). 
• Video speeches by executives 
• A union profile page that cherry-picks and spins language and data from the union’s constitution and OLMS filings; and
• An anonymous question box

Noticing another one of these anti-union websites, the enterprising labor attorney Matt Bruenig – founder of nlrbresearch.com and People’s Policy Institute – recently decided to create a “counter-website.” In a post titled “Union Busters Coming After Me,” Bruenig wrote in his newsletter (NLRB Edge) that the move has provoked quite a reaction from the union-busting employer, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center, and the lawyers that it has hired, touching off a “saga” that we thought we’d highlight given its relevance to our work. 

Bruenig’s counter-website was titled realfactsfredhutch.com and was a response to getthefactsfredhutch.com – which the Seattle-based Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center launched as part of an anti-union campaign against nurse practitioners and physician assistants organizing with the Union of American Physicians and Dentists (UAPD). Illustrating the formulaic nature of these websites, Bruenig said he discovered that the same union-busting firm that created the anti-union website also had created at least two other very similar anti-union websites – getthefactsprmce.com and provswedishfacts.com. All three websites use “Wordpress, run on a Bricks theme, and use the Automatic.css and BricksExtra plugins,” Bruenig wrote, and all three “have strikingly similar content and design despite totally different employers and unions.” 

For its election campaign, Fred Hutchinson had already been using at least three partner attorneys with Littler Mendelson, a notorious union-avoidance firm that charges up to $1,760 per hour. In addition, two recent Reddit posts allege that the employer has also been working with Miko Penn, an anti-union consultant who reportedly charges $475/hour.

But allegedly in response to Bruenig’s counter-website, Fred Hutchinson went ahead and hired at least two additional attorneys from another law firm, Ballard Spahr, to try to shut down his counter-website by “pretending like what [Fred Hutchinson] doesn’t like about the website is that it infringes upon Fred Hutch’s intellectual property,” Bruenig wrote. That alleged effort will end up costing Fred Hutchinson a pretty penny: According to a 2017 National Law Journal billing report, Ballard Spahr partners charged $895 an hour on average in 2017 – or about $1,200 an hour adjusted for inflation.

Trying to vaporize Bruenig’s website, Ballard Spahr first sent a takedown notice to the domain registrar for the site. Then, after Bruenig reports that he addressed every objection made about the website’s design by Ballard Spahr (even though Bruenig maintains that his website doesn’t actually infringe on Fred Hutchinson’s intellectual property), two attorneys with the firm called Bruenig and “proceeded to try to further intimidate me while offering totally non-specific continuing objections to the website,” he wrote. 

After Bruenig held his ground, Ballard Spahr’s campaign continued, he wrote. Allegedly responding to an objection that his FAQ page asked the same questions as the Fred Hutchinson anti-union FAQ page, Bruenig asked “whether they are really contending that I cannot ask ‘What is a labor union?’ or ‘What is the NLRB?’ on my website because Fred Hutch asked the same thing?” To which Bruenig said he received a “vague non-answer about how I should make something totally original.”

The pressure tactics that Bruenig describes, along with what we can infer that Fred Hutchinson is spending on its anti-union campaign, highlight the extreme lengths to which employers will go and the immense resources they will invest to prevent their workers from negotiating for better working conditions as a group, rather than alone. 

The Lawrence Times recently reported LaborLab’s mid-estimate that Bert Nash Mental Health Center – which fielded the website mentioned at the opening of this post – had incurred a cost of about $295,000, or $1,180 per worker during the first three weeks of its anti-union campaign. (Our estimated range was between $251,000 and $339,000.) 

But that’s actually on the low end of LaborLab’s estimates of employer spending per worker based on our reviews of annual LM-10 employer reports and cost estimates derived from other sources. In fact, in NLRB election campaigns that LaborLab could match to employer LM-10 reports, employers spent over $2,500 per worker on average on persuader consultants alone. That excludes the cost of attorneys, paid worker and supervisor time lost to the campaign and productivity losses – which, if included, could easily match or exceed $2,500 per worker, resulting in a total cost of $5,000 or more.  

Prompted by Bruenig’s newsletter, we used our union-busting calculator – which we recently launched a beta version of – to estimate the cost of Fred Hutchinson’s anti-union efforts to date. To do so, we drew on a methodology and default assumptions derived from scholarship on union-busting, anti-union manuals, LM-20 data, court records, engagement letters, and public wage data – the same methodology and assumptions that we used for a report on union-busting campaigns at nursing homes that we presented to the Minnesota Senate.

In all, our calculator estimates that Fred Hutchinson’s anti-union campaign has cost between $367,858 and $497,690 in attorney and consultant fees and expenses, lost worker and supervisor time, and productivity losses. Our mid-estimate of $432,774 works out to nearly $2,900 per worker. That means by the time nurse practitioners and physician assistants vote on whether to unionize with the Union of American Physicians and Dentists, Hutchinson may have invested well over $3,000 per worker in its anti-union campaign – resources that could have gone towards a wage increase in a first contract or to improve business operations. 

We’re embedding a breakdown of the estimate (both external and internal costs) below that our calculator generated

Mind you, this estimated cost excludes what Fred Hutchinson has coughed up to allegedly enlist Ballrd Spahr attorneys to neutralize Bruenig’s counter-website. While these alleged efforts have yet to bear fruit, if Ballard’s past reported billing rates are any guide, their cost could easily end up totaling several thousand dollars, perhaps even closer to $10,000. Highlighting Ballard’s willingness to put real time into its work, Bruenig reported that not one but two Ballard Spahr attorneys called him after an initial exchange to “try to further intimidate me.” An alleged letter from Ballard Spahr posted by Bruenig also would indicate that at least two other additional Ballard Spahr attorneys have worked on the effort to get him to take down his website as well. But what’s a few more thousand on top of a total estimated union-busting cost of over $400,000? 

We’re sharing Bruenig’s full account below. Subscribe to his newsletter, NLRB Edge, here. 

Union Busters Coming After Me: The Fred Hutch website saga

When employers want to stop their workers from organizing, they often hire special union avoidance companies — sometimes called labor persuaders — to run anti-union campaigns. The union busters use a pretty standard set of legal, illegal, and line-skirting tactics to try to scare workers away from voting yes in an upcoming union election.

One tool in the labor persuader toolkit is to put up a slick-looking anti-union website. This is what the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center (Fred Hutch) did recently in its efforts to prevent its Advanced Practice Providers (APPs) from unionizing with the Union of American Physicians and Dentists (UAPD).

UAPD filed a representation petition for a unit of APPs on May 28. Six days later, on June 3, Fred Hutch registered the domain getthefactsfredhutch.com. By June 10, at the latest, the domain was pointing to an anti-union website full of the usual stuff about how unions are a “business” that will take your money and lie to you.

When I say that this is the “usual stuff,” I mean that quite literally. Amusingly enough for what I am going to describe later in this piece, the same anti-union firm that put up getthefactsfredhutch.com also apparently put up getthefactsprmce.com and provswedishfacts.com. All three use WordPress, run on a Bricks theme, and use the Automatic.css and BricksExtra plugins. As you can see below, the three websites have strikingly similar content and design despite totally different employers and unions.

When I came upon the Fred Hutch website late last week, I thought it would be fun to create a response website. If anti-union firms are going to paste their usual slop into a slick website trying to persuade workers not to be in a union, then why not return the favor. It’s easier than ever to do with AI.

So on June 23, I registered realfactsfredhutch.com and proceeded to create a counter-website that responds to getthefactsfredhutch.com. I did this on my own. I received no money for doing it. In fact, it cost me $11.12.

Where the Fred Hutch website points out how much workers typically pay in dues, I point out how much more money unionized workers typically earn. Where the Fred Hutch website says that labor unions can legally say deceptive things during organizing campaigns, I point out that employers can legally say deceptive things during organizing campaigns (the NLRB has adopted a hands-off approach so as to avoid endlessly litigating election messages). Where the Fred Hutch website says in its answer to “what is a labor union” that it is a business workers pay to represent them, I answer the same question by saying unions are organizations of workers that bargain collectively.

The Fred Hutch bosses were apparently not happy with my website and so quickly hired Ballard Spahr, a Big Law firm, to harass me about it by pretending like what it doesn’t like about the website is that it infringes upon Fred Hutch’s intellectual property. Ballard Spahr began its campaign to shut me down by sending a takedown notice to Cloudflare, my domain registrar and DNS. Cloudflare sent me an automated message about it and sent an automated message to my virtual private server provider, Digital Ocean. Digital Ocean then sent me an automated message about it, saying it was in my discretion whether to comply.

The website, which is completely non-commercial in nature, was never infringing on any Fred Hutch IP. But the notice from Ballard Spahr did contain some specific complaints about similar colors and similar CSS and so I decided I would just make every change they asked me to make. I copied all of their objections into a Claude Code session and prompted the harness to do every single thing Ballard Spahr asked of me.

The Claude Code harness proceeded to completely rewrite the entire website — all of the HTML, CSS, and JS — from scratch, so as to be totally sure there were no WordPress artifacts still in there. Instead of blue and teal, it went to red and beige. There are clear disclaimers at the top and bottom of every page to ensure that nobody could ever think this is a Fred Hutch website rather than an independent website about the Fred Hutch organizing campaign.

I even gave Ballard Spahr a call and left a voicemail letting them know I had made all the changes they asked for and to give me a call back so we can hash out any other concerns they might have.

A couple of days later, two (2) Ballard Spahr lawyers called me (might as well double-bill the client I guess) and proceeded to try to further intimidate me while offering totally non-specific continuing objections to the website. They even accused me of dishonesty when I explained to them who I am and that I am doing this on my own out of my own pocket.

The only clear thing that they demanded was that I transfer to them my realfactsfredhutch.com domain, on the theory that it infringes on the Fred Hutch trademark. I explained to them that this is not the case. Under the nominative fair use doctrine, you are allowed to use someone else’s trademark to talk about a company, which is exactly what I have done. They know that of course. They are IP lawyers. But they don’t care. Their job is not to make sure IP laws are followed. It is to intimidate anyone their well-endowed clients point them towards.

I pointed out that this sort of nominative fair use is very common in the labor context. TraderJoesUnited.org, which is about the Trader Joe’s organizing campaign, is not an IP infringement. Neither is StarbucksWorkersUnited.org. When I asked them whether they believe those are IP infringements, I was told that they don’t answer hypothetical questions.

Beyond demanding that I give them the domain, all I got were vague objections to the content being too similar. They objected to the fact that my FAQ page has the same questions on it as the Fred Hutch anti-union FAQ page, which itself has the same questions on it as the Providence Regional Medical Center FAQ page and the Providence Swedish FAQ page. They are, after all, frequently asked questions.

In response to these objections, I asked them whether they are really contending that I cannot ask “What is a labor union?” or “What is the NLRB?” on my website because Fred Hutch asked the same thing. To which I got a vague non-answer about how I should make something totally original.

Of course, the purpose of my website is to respond to the Fred Hutch website, to give pro-union answers to the same questions Fred Hutch gave anti-union answers to. The parallelism is part of the point-counterpoint nature of my message. I would say that this seemed to be lost on them, but again, it wasn’t really. Ballard Spahr lawyers are not stupid, just greedy.

The call ended with no progress being made. So, yesterday, Ballard Spahr emailed me the below letter.

The letter mostly complains about the first version of the website, the one that existed before I made every change they asked me to make. The word “original” — used in reference to the first version of the site — appears eleven times in the five-page letter. I guess they had already billed a bunch of hours typing up what they did not like about that first version and felt like they had to make some use of it. But, needless to say, I can’t do anything about the first version of the website. It’s already gone.

The only thing that does not seem to be about the first version of the website is that they want my domain (which is nominative fair use) and that they don’t like my FAQ page because it “contains identically worded questions and nearly identically worded answers as on Fred Hutch’s site, and they are presented in the same order, within the same categories, and using the same drop-down functionality.”

Last night, I responded to this complaint by changing the order of the questions, moving some of the questions into different categories, eliminating a couple of the categories, and making it so that the answer to each question is permanently visible rather than having the answers populate using drop-down functionality.

This is what they care about, right? The drop-down functionality, right? Well it’s gone now and I’m sure that will satisfy them. After all, they are genuinely concerned about their intellectual property, not using IP law as a bad faith pretext to try to shut down speech they don’t want their workers to hear. Right?

If Fred Hutch is willing to go to these lengths to intimidate some random guy with a website who is mostly out of their reach, one can only imagine what they must be doing to their own workers, people who are economically dependent on the company and therefore have good reason to fear retaliation. Workers won’t have freedom until we can put a stop to this kind of thuggery.