John and Cynthia, both regional leaders of national retail chains, are catching up at a local business networking event, when Cynthia asks John how he’s handling the increase of union organizing activity–if he’s checking in on his area locations or planning any communications to his employees. John is stunned–he has no idea what “increase” she’s referring to, and knowing what his company will think about being caught by surprise by a union petition, starts peppering her with questions.
By the time an RC petition shows up in your inbox, the campaign is months old. Most employers get one thing wrong about organizing. They see the RC petition as the START of something. Today it’s usually the END. Once a union gets to an election, that company is unionized nearly 8 out of 10 times.
Think about what that quiet, pre-petition phase looks like from the outside. Unions often run campaigns in waves, by sector and by region. The same organizers move from one employer to the next. When a distribution center nearby gets a petition, that’s not just news about them. It’s a signal about everyone in your labor market.
The trouble is that the signal is scattered.
NLRB filings are public, but they land in a national database keyed to the filer, not to you. Nobody sends you an alert when an organizer starts working the employer down the highway. The activity that should function as your early-warning system (petitions happening in your area and your industry) sits in plain sight, unread, until one of them is yours.
The employers who handle organizing well aren’t lucky. They’re not necessarily better at running a campaign. They’re proactive. They see the sector heating up. They’ve already trained their supervisors, tightened up their communication, and fixed the obvious grievances before anyone shows up passing out cards.
The companies who struggle are almost always the ones who got surprised — not because the warning signs weren’t there, but because no one was watching for them.
You can’t prepare for a campaign you don’t know is coming. But you can watch the activity around you, and the window that gives you is the difference between leading the conversation and reacting to it.
