When workers seek to form a union, employers often respond by hiring union-avoidance consultants to dissuade workers from their organizing efforts. A recent EPI and LaborLab report estimates that employers spend over $1.5 billion each year on union avoidance. Last week, our partners at LaborLab released new tools that shed light on the highly secretive and highly profitable union-avoidance industry.

The Union-Busting Cost Calculator helps workers estimate how much their employers are spending on union-avoidance consultants, instead of investing that money in their workplaces. Too often employers claim unions are third parties that disrupt workplace dynamics and create costs for workers who are paying for representation they don’t need. On the contrary, unions win wage increases and benefits for workers, and it is employers who spend millions on third-party union-avoidance consultants, rather than raising workers’ wages and improving working conditions. Further, employers often hire the same consulting and law firms to help with their union avoidance. LaborLab’s union-buster search helps demystify who the key actors are in the union-avoidance industry and identify who is behind anti-union campaigns.

If workers understand who their employers are hiring and how much they are spending on union avoidance, this will empower workers in their organizing campaigns. The union-avoidance industry has a devastating impact on workers’ ability to organize in the United States. That is because decades of federal policy and court decisions have weakened federal labor law to the point that employers violate the law with impunity. Union-avoidance consultants and law firms exploit these weaknesses to reach the same goal: to defeat the union. This has caused a significant decline in unionization rates in the United States: Only 1 in 10 workers are represented by a union today, compared with 1 in 3 during the 1950s. It is well documented that the decline in unionization has contributed to increased inequality over the past 45 years.

However, this hasn’t dissuaded workers from organizing. Workers across industries—from graduate students to nurses to baristas—are forming unions and collectively bargaining over improved pay, benefits, and working conditions. In 2025, more than 16.5 million workers were represented by a union, which is the highest level recorded in 16 years.

It should be no surprise that workers are seeking to form unions, even with the odds stacked against them. Unionized workers are more likely to have higher pay, access to employer-sponsored health insurance and retirement, and safer working conditions compared with nonunion workers. Further, the benefits of unions go beyond a single workplace; they also help create stronger communities. Much like unions are a tool to rebalance unequal bargaining power in the labor market, resources like LaborLab’s Union-Busting Cost Calculator and the union-buster search can help even the playing field for workers.