US Employers Spend Over $1.5 Billion a Year to Fight Union Efforts, Study Finds

A new report finds that U.S. employers spend more than $1.5 billion a year to fight labor unions, hiring union-avoidance consultants and lawyers to prevent worker organizing.

The report, published jointly by the Economic Policy Institute and LaborLab on Wednesday, estimates that employers spend roughly $1.7 billion annually on union avoidance consultants and law firms to prevent workers “from organizing and bargaining for better pay and working conditions.”

Though unionization in the U.S. has grown to its highest levels in 15 years, nonunion workers face mounting obstacles to joining a union. Over the past few decades, large law firms have developed business specialization in fighting unionization efforts, the report notes. This includes providing union avoidance consultants to employers to prevent union elections, push workers to vote against unions, and stall collective bargaining agreements.

Firms like Littler Mendelson, Morgan Lewis, and Jackson Lewis have represented employers against workers’ organizing efforts at Amazon, Starbucks, and Trader Joe’s, to name only a few.

“Union avoidance law firms have… constructed an industry providing counsel on union busting,” the report says, adding that the firms take advantage of legal loopholes to add barriers to union organizing and to help conceal their advising of companies.

The report found that in 2025, Amazon spent over $26.6 million on union avoidance consultants, while other companies spent between $400,000 and $2 million on union-busting services. But the report says that this is still an undercount, because of lack of mandated reporting of the “advice” provided by consultants, and failure to report services even when the reporting is mandated.

“It’s important to note that this estimate doesn’t begin to account for the much greater internal costs that employers incur to prevent and resist unionization, including spending on in-house employee relations specialists, who are charged with keeping employers union-free,” Teke Wiggin, a co-author of the report and strategic coordinator at LaborLab, told Truthout.

“There is already a massive power imbalance between workers and employers,” he continued, adding:

Spending billions on anti-union attorneys and consultants who deploy tactics crafted by psychologists to divide and conquer workers and to make unionization feel futile or even dangerous … that further magnifies and exploits this existing power imbalance.

The report also notes that decades of federal policy and court decisions have weakened the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), which guarantees workers the right to organize and to collective bargaining — and that law firms have exploited weaknesses and loopholes in the law.

“Unionizing is much harder than it should be,” Wiggin said in a press release. “That’s partly because there are no limits on the amount of time and money employers can invest in union avoidance, and because employers are only required to disclose a tiny fraction of anti-union campaign spending due to reporting loopholes.”

Previous disclosures have found that union busters often earn 20 times more than the workers they aim to pressure not to unionize. LaborLab estimated that an average Amazon driver, for example, takes 45 days to earn what the company’s union buster makes in a day.