One weird trick for busting your bartenders' union

There are many ways to bust a union. Are there enough to sustain a spoof rewrite of Paul Simon’s 1975 hit single “50 Ways To Leave Your Lover”? I’m not a songwriter or a labor lawyer, but sure, probably. There are certainly enough to sustain a book. It’s called Confessions of A Union-Buster, and its upshot is that bosses and hired-gun consultants have all sorts of legal and illegal moves to halt a union drive at their company, workers trying to unionize to demand a better workplace have each other and some union cards and maybe the fractional attention of an overworked staff organizer at an underfunded local. In other words, not much.

Most union-busting tactics fall into one of three types. Companies spend lots of money telling their workers that unions are bad, outdated, and dumb to prevent them from organizing in the first place. If that fails, they’ll spend a lot more money trying to swing the vote against the union. And if that fails, they’ll drag out negotiations on a first contract for as long as possible, until they’re able to pick off or force out enough of the union’s original supporters to make decertification viable. You can see these tactics everywhere, from Amazon and Trader Joe’s right on down to Sapporo-Stone Brewing and Death & Co. It’s a playbook, and bosses are good at running it.

There’s also a fourth type of union-busting that you simply don’t see very much these days, for reasons that will become apparent in a moment. But the abrupt closure of a popular Brooklyn restaurant earlier this month offers a fresh case study.

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