Microsoft pinky-swears not to union bust

Microsoft, a company attempting to win regulatory approval for a merger with Activision and its newly unionized subsidiary, Raven Software, has promised it definitely won’t crack down on organizing workers with an iron fist or anything like that.

In a June 2 blog post, Brad Smith, Microsoft’s president and vice chair, announced the company has adopted four principles toward organizing—the foremost of which is recognition of the fact that workers have a “legal right to choose whether to form or join a union.” Other principles include commitments to listen to worker concerns, “creative and collaborative approaches when employees wish to exercise their rights” and when Microsoft is presented with a “specific unionization proposal,” and a “close relationship and shared partnership with all our employees, ​​including those represented by a union.” Smith wrote that his view was shaped, in part, by his experience working in Microsoft’s European unit in the 1990s, where, he wrote, the company has “collaborated closely” with work councils and unions.

It’s not exactly as though Microsoft is encouraging unionization, even though the post acknowledges that “inevitably these issues will touch on more businesses, potentially including our own.” Smith emphasized, in bold, that workers “will never need to organize to have a dialogue with Microsoft’s leaders,” and the post stops short of promising the company will voluntarily recognize a union or the outcome of a union election.

But it’s a seemingly more conciliatory approach than that taken by fellow tech giants like Amazon and Google which have fought unionization efforts tooth and nail, including with some tactics the NLRB has alleged are illegal. The Communications Workers of America, the union that represents Raven employees, called the post “encouraging and unique among the major tech companies.”

Labor experts consulted by IT Brew were cautiously optimistic this could potentially mean Microsoft is breaking rank from some of their more heavy-handed brethren in an era where organized labor appears to finally be making inroads into white-collar tech fields. But they noted that talk is just that, given the long tradition of union-busting in corporate America.

Microsoft’s blog post is a “major step and very different from the reflexively anti-union comments and actions of its competitors,” Harley Shaiken, a professor emeritus of education at UC Berkeley who specializes in labor and globalization, wrote to IT Brew via email. “That said, what’s critical is how the company translates this into reality. They’ve written a check but it still needs their signature to cash it to the bank.”

Rebecca Givan, an associate professor at Rutgers School of Management and Labor Relationswrote to IT Brew that Microsoft had made “some promises to which it can be held accountable. If Microsoft now spends money on union-busting in the face of a future attempt to organize a union, it will have to explain itself.”

“For now, Microsoft seems to be trying to set itself apart from most other employers, who are perfectly comfortable taking an explicitly anti-union stance,” Givan added.

Ileen DeVault, a professor of labor history and the director of the Worker Institute at Cornell University, told IT Brew that Smith’s reference to labor relations in Europe stood out.

“In Europe, there’s a much more collaborative spirit,” DeVault said. “There’s this whole tradition in Europe of setting up work councils, where foremen and managers and representatives of the workers themselves all are…the ones who collectively agree on all sorts of workplace issues.”

“I would guess some of it is PR, given right now unions have all of a sudden sort of come out of the shadows, and become more popular in all sorts of locations where you never heard rumors of unionization in the past,” DeVault added.—TM

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