What is a Strategic Labor Campaign? 360 Degree Pressure on an Employer’s Relationships

A fixture of labor strategy since the 1980s, strategic labor campaigns have evolved from focusing on generating operational pressure and legal risk to strategies for creating reputational damage, material financial risk, and disruption to critical institutional relationships. Strategic campaigns today demonstrate a sophisticated network, coordinated nationally and globally, governed by written multiyear plans, and carried out across multiple legal and public arenas. The campaign employs a straightforward calculus: make the conflict more costly than coming to terms.

With attacks on a company’s brand, operations, leadership, and employment practices, a campaign attempts to weaken employer resistance to the campaigner’s demands. Campaigners construct so-called "dilemma actions," so that any employer response advances a campaign objective. Resistance becomes evidence of bad faith, while accommodation becomes the predicate for the next demand.

If You are Facing a Strategic Campaign, Hunton Can Help Advance Your Agenda and Relieve the Operational Burden

Hunton provides integrated responses for targeted employers that are designed to address the overall architecture of a strategic labor campaign—not simply its visible outputs. We work with our clients to preempt union campaign strategies by understanding the campaign elements, its key actors, and its objectives, rather than react to tactics. We focus on areas campaigners have identified as high value and high risk, such as regulatory oversight, securities law, and shareholder engagement, defending and bringing campaign-related antitrust cases, and generally examining union “strategic litigation” theories, exposing use beyond ordinary legal purpose.

We seek to avoid a reactive approach where a target may inadvertently enable a campaign to advance on its planned timeline through reactive responses, or which results in reputational damage (itself a campaign objective). For example, unfair labor practices may signal a developing attack on Directors when external markers, such as activist “appeal letters,” provide notice of issues that can be used to support claims that the Board failed to act when action was called for, while also providing a basis for investor engagement and securities litigation.

ESG commitments and human rights policies must be developed with an awareness of how campaigns deploy those instruments: A company’s own stated standards become the measure against which its conduct is judged. For example, a consumer-facing company’s ESG or human rights commitments can become the benchmark for allegations that its representations are misleading or deceptive. Companies with European operations—and European companies doing business in the United States—face additional exposure, with many international instruments and conventions, such as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises on Responsible Business Conduct, as well as less obvious vehicles, such as the EU Anti-SLAPP Directive.

Our team helps employers build proactive agendas to identify these issues and risks before they become crises, disrupt a campaign’s escalation sequence, and change the cost calculus for organizations facing a strategic campaign. Our experience includes:

• Strategic campaign identification, monitoring, and response
• Proactive agenda development and timeline disruption
• Counter-campaign litigation strategy
• Shareholder proposal and investor engagement
• ESG, human rights, and international-standard commitments
• Securities disclosure and human capital risk
• OECD guidelines and NCP proceedings
• Human rights, supply chain policies, human rights due diligence, and social audits
• Crisis management and communications coordination

If you are facing a campaign or trying to stay ahead of campaigns likely to target your business, we will collaborate with you to develop a comprehensive response plan.