For going on 30 years, LRI has been coaching our clients that the key to an effective counter-organizing strategy is to focus on the facts, and take the emotion out of the campaign. The reasons are obvious – union organizing tactics rely almost exclusively on ignoring reality, and agitating employees over perceived “injustices,” to incite them to vote from a purely emotional response. Big Labor knows that their cause shrivels under the scrutiny of facts, and admonishes labor activists to use the smoky haze of emotion to cloud the facts of their issues. 
Starting in Indiana, in the fight over a recently proposed Right To Work law, the Indiana Chamber of Commerce released a study indicating that such a law would increase average per capita income and create jobs. Indiana AFL-CIO President said the study was “misleading and distorted,” and that Indiana workers would face lower wages, worse benefits and less effective workplace-safety regulations. Ken Brinegar, the President of the local Chamber, observed, “Actually, no facts were mentioned at all in the union reply; that’s because the union argument is strictly an emotional one.” Decrying the lost battle over the Employee Free Choice Act, and now the losing debate over public-employee unions, a labor journalist comments, “by saying unions were necessary for a good economy, unions were in effect defending their right to exist. The debate became about unions and not about the awful intimidation tactics of the boss.” Reading between the lines, it is obvious that the strategy being promoted is to steer away from facts, away from any attempt to justify the need or value of unions, and to instead create some “evil entity” to target, stylize the arguments in emotional terms, and push the pedal to the metal:
The response to Waiting for Superman was a good example. Teachers unions allowed themselves to get into a debate about whether or not teachers unions were a good thing. This is not the debate organized labor wants to be having, since every person has a personal anecdote of a bad teacher or nightmare experience at the DMV. Instead, unions should have pointed out that the people advocating for market based principles of education reform did not represent real people, but were instead funded by hedge funds and billionaires like Bill Gates (see this must-read piece by Joanne Barkan in Dissent magazine on the billionaries [sic] funding “education reform” messages). Focusing on the so called “grassroots credibility” of the messengers delivering these attacks instead of on teachers unions would have put anti-union forces on the defensive instead of organized labor.
Ah yes, don’t focus on the facts of the argument, focus on the messenger (or other diversion strategy). Another notable quote:
Instead of trying to counter the message, the labor movement should instead use guerilla journalism tactics to take out the messenger. We should point out very clearly that the people attacking unions are liars and they are bought off by industries that stand to gain from attacking unions.
For those of us in the trenches of union organizing, there’s nothing new here.
