Confessions of a Union Buster

Sitting in his home near Columbus, Georgia, Bob Powers seems like an affable and easy-going guy. With his thinning blond hair and warm smile, he could be a friendly insurance salesman, or perhaps the manager of your neighborhood supermarket.

But his low-key manner belies a powerful, behind-the-scenes role. For more than a decade, Powers was one of the most influential filmmakers in the South. He never advertised his movies, never got a single review—yet he always had a captive audience, and his viewers almost always did what he told them to do.

Beginning in the 1970s, Powers wrote and produced scores of movies and slideshows designed to turn workers against unions and keep factories unorganized. Dozens of major corporations faced with union elections hired him to make anti-union movies, and then ordered their employees to watch the films on company time.

Powers broke up union drives in nearly every Southern state, producing materials for companies like General Electric, Hospital Corporation of America, Sara Lee, Tappan, NAPA, and Cagle Poultry.

Speaking to us at his home, Powers described how he got his start busting unions with Paul French and Partners in La Grange, Georgia.

 

I went to work for Paul French in the mid-1970’s. I had been a music major in college, and I started doing some work on his films. Then he came up with an idea—why not make films for management?

Our first campaign was at Swift Textiles in Columbus, Georgia. Little by little, companies began to accept the idea of using media to fight unions. By the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, we began to get more in demand.

French developed a formula that got results. It was called the 25th Hour show because we showed it 25 hours before people voted on the union. Over the years, we had a winning record of 99 percent.

We started by doing our homework. We talked to the company attorney and got all the details about union activity at the plant. We checked our computer network and researched the outcome of the union’s other campaigns over the previous five years. We traveled to the plant and talked to the plant manager, the personnel manager, the line supervisors, the facility nurse. We formed a “focus group” of five or six anti-union employees and questioned them about what the union was promising.

When it was time to write the script, we would meet with the management and their attorney to plan what we would say. The attorney would say, “Well, we have to get in how the plant would close if the union wins.” Management would look all scared and say, “That’s not right—it’s not going to close.” But the attorney would just say, “It doesn’t matter. This place could never close, but we got to get that in the movie to scare them.”

Eventually, more and more managers handed over control to us. After all, we were masters of innuendo—and the managers did not have to worry about making a speech in which they could slip up and say something they weren’t supposed to.

 

All the workers knew when they went in to see the show that they were a captive audience, that it would be an anti-union presentation. So we designed the show to disarm people.

In the first three to four minutes there was a song. It was about God and apple pie. While the music played, we showed pictures of the town, all the schools, the churches.

Then it turned to pictures of the workers—all of them looking happy and smiling. The narrator would talk about how we can be Number One if we all work together.

Next it turned to dialogue, with actors playing characters. One was a union supporter, who was a disagreeable type, and one was a company supporter. The dialogue revolved around a third character—our target. We would base this character on demographics. If we were trying to win over the black women voters, for instance, we’d have this character be a black woman.

In the dialogue we would raise issues against the union in such a way that the National Labor Relations Board couldn’t get us for illegally threatening to close the plant. We would have a character say things like, “Gosh, I hear they could close this place if the union gets in.” And another character would say, “Oh, no, they couldn’t do something like that.”

We planted a seed in their minds. It’s the same thing as in a court of law. If someone says something and the defense jumps up and says, “I object,” the judge turns to the jury and says, “Disregard what you just heard.” They can disregard it all they want, but they still heard it—and they’re going to think about it all day long. It may be wrong, but it’s just human nature. So we would take every opportunity to plant those seeds.

During the show, we would constantly portray the union as an outside force invading the privacy of the plant and the community. Voting for the union would mean dues and strikes; voting against the union would ensure independence and peace.

When the show ended, company supporters we had planted in the audience would start a round of applause.

Workers often believed that the actors we used were real employees. People would come up to me after a show and say, “What shift does that black girl work on? I’d like to meet her—she’s pretty.” One of the actors we used was Bob Hanna, an Atlanta actor who has done a lot of movies and stuff like The Dukes of Hazzard. He was a pro-union character in one of our labor shows we ran in a textile plant in North Carolina. Sometime later he was doing a made-for-TV movie in a town near that textile community, and one night he went out to a bar after a day of filming.

Some guy in the bar remembered the show, and he remembered Bob’s face. “I remember you—you’re the guy who was for the union!” Bob talked a blue streak, trying to explain that he was just an actor, but the guy didn’t buy it. He was a company man, and he thought the company would pat him on the back for picking a fight with Bob. They got into a fist fight, and they both spent the night in jail.

I tell you, those shows really turned some people completely around. I remember elections at Hanes, a subsidiary of Sara Lee, at their plants in Galax, Virginia and Sparta, North Carolina. The preliminary vote was running more than 80 percent against the company. We went in with these shows and turned it totally around in six weeks.

 

By and large, in my many years of doing this, I really didn’t get that involved. The elections were generally over petty things—someone didn’t get a cost-of-living raise, and they were mad about that. It didn’t matter to me one way or the other.

It was only later, when I began to see situations where people were really being mistreated by management, that I began to question what I was doing. There were a number of occasions when I would go in and gather the research and talk to people, and I would go home at night and think, “These people really need a union. This company is wrong.”

I knew I was going to have an effect on these people, on their decision about the union. I wasn’t going to deceive them, as such—but in a way, I really was. I was going to tell them a side of the truth that would get them to turn against the union, even though they hadn’t had an opportunity to hear both sides.

I began to feel I was playing God with people’s lives.

I remember a show we did at a poultry plant in Alabama. You could see these workers—mostly black women, and mostly heads of households —doing the best they could to raise a family and liv eon what they were making. You could see them excited about the opportunity to vote against the company—you could really see it on their faces.

You’re also there when the show runs, and you can see what happens when it gets to the subtle, implied threat that the plant will close down if they vote the union in. This is the major industry in this little town, the only plant within 30 miles. You can see their faces as they make that hard decision— “Do I do what I know is right and vote for the union, or do I vote for the company just so they won’t close down? I can’t afford to lose my job. I won’t be able to support my children.”

I knew the company wasn’t going to close that plant down no matter what happened, but here were these workers having to make that decision. Just implying that it maybe would happen is enough to make people stop in their tracks. I know they agonized over those decisions. They didn’t get any sleep the night before they had to cast that vote because their lives were at stake, their livelihoods.

If we hadn’t run that show, those people would have voted in the union. That’s how much power we had. It’s all in the way you say it. You don’t lie—you just propagandize.

 

Both sides have their own propaganda, but the unions don’t have a level playing field. They don’t have a captive audience for their speeches the way the company does. They can’t make employees sit down and force them to watch a multi-media show. They can invite people to come, but they can’t make people come. The company can pay people for that hour and make them watch it. So the playing field becomes very tilted to the company’s side.

I asked Paul French, “Do you think we would do as well if we could do a show for a union and the union had a captive audience the way the company does?”

He said, “Apply the same techniques and do it for a union? The results couldn’t help but be the same.” He said it would be so much more fun to work for the unions because the companies caused the situation in the first place—it would be a ton of fun to play with them. Boy, you could really make some company people squirm! He said he would have loved to have worked for a union, but there’s no money in it.

We did shows for big clients, the General Electrics of the world, who could afford to pay for it. We usually charged $10,000 to $20,000 for a customized show.

We usually worked directly with Lovic Brooks, one of the big management consultants. He read our scripts. Sometimes we talked with some of his lawyers about how we were doing the same thing as Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi chief of propaganda. We were in awe of him. “Wow, that was a powerful guy. He was a master of this.” I don’t think the world had even heard of the word propaganda until it was applied to him.

After we won the election at Hanes, I got a little Christmas present in the mail from one of Lovic’s attorneys. It was a selection of sayings by Goebbels, collected in a little thesis published by the University of Mississippi press or something like that.

I was shocked. It was fun to talk about it, but it was a totally different thing to get a book in the mail. It was like they were trying to make it okay. Sitting down and joking about shooting Saddam Hussein would be one thing—but if you went home that night and the government of the United States had sent you a plane ticket and an Uzi machine gun and expected you to do it, it would be different.

 

I left Paul French in December of 1986. I was glad. I had really had enough of it. I had started bringing it home with me, and it was wrecking my home life.

I try to let workers know how they are being misled by these phony films, but I am not a union loyalist. I don’t even know what it’s like. I don’t know what anybody who’s in a union thinks and feels. So it’s hard for me to sit there during a union campaign and go, “Hurrah, hurrah!” I’m not going to fake it and say, “Yahoo, go union.” All I can do is share what itis like on the other side. It’s cold, it’s calculating on the other side.

It's cold, it’s calculating on the other side. This is the most important thing I can tell you: If you are ever involved in a union election, if you ever see a 25th Hour show — you can bet your bottom dollar that for every argument made, there is another argument you haven’t heard. For every issue that is raised, for everything that is said in that show, there is a totally different side to the story that you’re not hearing anything about.

Don’t let anyone play God with your life. If you are going in to see one of those shows, beware. It’s not a lie. It just isn’t the whole truth.