When Minnesota nursing home workers have tried to exercise their legal right to organize for better wages and working conditions over the last few years, many of their employers have responded by hiring outside consultants and attorneys to stop them. Behind the scenes, management, lawyers, and professional union-busters coordinated to try to defeat these union drives, often before workers were fully aware of what they were up against. Today, LaborLab is releasing The Price of Repression, our analysis of the estimated costs of five anti-union campaigns at four nursing homes across the state between 2022 and 2025.
The numbers are striking. LaborLab estimates that employers invested anywhere from $139,000 to over $400,000 to prevent workers from organizing, depending on the campaign. To put that into perspective, that’s the equivalent of average wage increases ranging from 3.8 to 20 percent for the targeted workers. This suggests that at least some of these nursing homes might have saved money by opting for the high-road response to union organizing: voluntarily recognizing the union upon proof of majority support and then agreeing to decent wage increases in a first contract. Instead, these employers spent significant resources in an effort to prevent critically-important workers from gaining a degree of collective influence over their wages, working conditions, and patient care.
The methodology and calculations in our report draw on government filings, industry billing rates, anti-union campaign manuals, previous scholarly studies, and LaborLab’s own research, and include upper and lower estimates to account for uncertainty. That uncertainty is real, and by design. The union-busting industry operates in the shadows. Disclosure requirements are weak, routinely violated, and riddled with loopholes, which means the true cost of these campaigns might be higher than what we’ve estimated based on the available evidence.