A Study Says Going Public Against Unions Raises Output

The finding is tempting. The reason behind it is a lawsuit.

Two Cornell accounting professors, Martin Wiernsperger and Xinyu Zhang, ran an experiment: 540 students, groups of four, one manager and three workers, seven rounds of a simple counting task for pay. In some groups the manager’s opposition to collective bargaining was disclosed to workers. In others it wasn’t.

The result: when opposition was disclosed, workers who already preferred individual bargaining worked harder and earned more. Workers who preferred collective bargaining barely moved.

Why did they work harder? Because they read the manager’s stance as information about how pay would be set. As Zhang put it, “Managers’ opposition gives workers information, and that information can change their behavior.” Workers inferred that under individual bargaining, the manager intended to use discretion — and that effort would be rewarded.

The productivity gain in this study comes from workers concluding that staying non-union means better pay for better work.

That inference is what Section 8(c) of the NLRA is all about. An employer is free to express views, arguments, and opinions about unionization. What Section 8(c) does not protect is a threat of reprisal or a promise of benefit. If your communications are engineered to leave employees believing that individual treatment will pay better than a contract would, you have moved from protected opinion to implied promise — and during a campaign, that’s an unfair labor practice charge for violating section 8(a)(1) with a potential objection to an employer’s election win.

Don’t build a campaign around this. It’s a lab experiment with undergraduates counting zeros in tables — useful for isolating a signal, not for predicting what happens in your plant. And it’s a conference paper on SSRN, not settled science.

For employers: state your position if you have one. Explain what a contract actually changes. But have counsel review the language before it goes out, because the difference between “here’s our view” and “you’ll do better without them” is the difference between a lawful campaign and a rerun.

The study is here: https://lnkd.in/gjvkS6uU

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