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Union Free

Does your management team, especially first line supervisors, and your employees understand the company's position on remaining union free? Would your management team know what to do if authorization cards were being passed by your employees, and do they know what they can and cannot do as representatives of management? If not, the element of prevention as well as opportunity to prevail over actual organizing activity is significantly diminished.

Have you ever really thought about it; FLEXIBILITY, PRODUCTIVITY, CHANGE, COOPERATION; what do these words mean to you and do you think they might be important in the management of your business? If the answer is yes and you want to preserve your freedom to directly interface with your employees without shop stewards, business agents, grievance/arbitration procedures, and numerous contractual limitations, don't take it for granted.  Question is, have you just been lucky or do you have a well thought out strategy in place to preserve status quo?

Although risk and propensity of employees to search out the union for representation varies considerably, absent a well thought out plan that educates your employees and trains your managers in preserving union free status, you are at risk.

To reduce vulnerability in organizing campaigns among your employees requires PROACTIVE preventative labor relations while taking care to comply with the law. Before the fact, you should understand that the single most important reason employees join unions is that they feel they are being treated arbitrarily, unjustly, or unfairly by management, and this feeling is usually caused or accentuated by poor communications with their supervisor. Therefore, how your supervisors go about handling interaction with their subordinates who work in your company is of vital importance.

The best deterrent to organizing is prevention on the front end, but you can't ignore the possibility that the union organizer could come calling. Question is, do you and your management team know what to do both before, and "when the union organizer comes calling"?