It’s no secret that management at major firms such as Starbucks and Tesla aren’t exactly fans of unionization. But for other companies, how does an anti-union stance affect worker output and performance?
It might depend on whether that stance is, in fact, a secret.
New research by Martin Wiernsperger and Xinyu Zhang, both assistant professors of accounting at the Samuel Curtis Johnson Graduate School of Management, in the Cornell SC Johnson College of Business, finds that under individual bargaining, publicly disclosing management’s opposition to collective bargaining (CB) led workers who prefer individual bargaining to increase their effort and earn higher wages, but workers who prefer CB do not.
The reason: Workers who prefer individual bargaining interpret managers’ opposition to collective bargaining as a signal that greater effort will be rewarded. But workers who prefer collective bargaining tend to be unsurprised by their managers’ anti-union stance, and their behaviors largely remain unchanged.
“Workers use the manager’s public stance to infer how managers intend to set pay under individual bargaining,” Zhang said. “Managers’ opposition gives workers information, and that information can change their behavior.”
Wiernsperger and Zhang are co-authors of “When Managers Publicly Oppose Collective Bargaining: Effects on Worker Productivity and Wages,” which they presented at the 2026 Columbia Management Accounting Conference, held May 8-9 at Columbia Business School. They also presented the work at conferences at the University of California, Davis; in Bern, Switzerland; and in Vienna, Austria.
“The main effect we find is that, for those workers who favor individual bargaining, once they see their managers so publicly opposing collective bargaining, they change their behavior most significantly,” Wiernsperger said. “We think that applies to a large share of the U.S. workers, many of whom think, ‘I want to be autonomous, I don’t want to depend on the union. I want to make my own calls.'”
Despite a slight uptick in collective bargaining activity in recent years, after the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, most workers are still unsure about whether unionization is the way to go. Managers are overwhelmingly against unions. According to the researchers, only 11.2% of U.S. workers – approximately 1 in 9 – are covered by a CB agreement.
The researchers wondered what the effect of managers’ opposition to unions, provided they are made public (such as at Starbucks and Tesla, for example), would be on workers’ productivity. They designed an experiment that isolated the effect of disclosing managers’ opposition to CB on groups of workers that favored either collective or individual wage negotiation.
In an experiment where participants played the roles of managers and workers, a total of 540 college students were separated into groups of four. One student was randomly selected to play the role of manager, with the other three playing workers; they retained their roles over seven periods of the experiment.
At the beginning of each period, the manager offered a contract to three workers, which called for three minutes of work on a simple task (counting the zeros in a table of random numbers) in exchange for a fixed wage. Workers’ output also created payoffs for the manager. For each group, the manager’s choice of bargaining method was either disclosed or not disclosed to workers.
Furthermore, managers were told that individual bargaining allows them to adjust wages based on past performance and expectations for the future, and reduce the likelihood of a strike (should CB workers reject the manager’s offer).
Of the 135 managers in the experiment, 123 chose individual bargaining; the 12 groups whose manager chose collective bargaining were excluded from the main analyses. The researchers elicited workers’ bargaining preference before they were informed which bargaining method their group was to use, and before the manager’s opposition to collective bargaining was disclosed. That ensured capturing baseline attitudes toward each method, rather than responses to the managers’ choices.
“It’s a rather abstract experiment,” Wiernsperger said, “but the important thing is that it has real incentives. The participants bargain for extra money, and the task is such that there is no real skill involved, but we can measure how hard they work.”
The results – including worker effort, measured in output of tables completed – clearly showed that disclosing managers’ opposition to CB led to increased effort and wages for workers who preferred individual bargaining, but not for those workers who favored CB.
This research could help inform management practices, particularly in light of recent surges in unionization efforts.
“Many workers are trying to figure out whether they should unionize or not,” Wiernsperger said. “And there are a lot of different opinions. Some workers think unions are bad, some think they are good and many are split in the middle. And obviously, management at most firms is pretty strongly opposed to unions.”
Said Zhang: “We think the manager’s communication tells workers something about the manager’s expectations and perceptions. It’s not whether individual bargaining or collective bargaining is better – it’s that managers intend to use their discretion under individual bargaining, and workers may respond differently depending on their own bargaining preferences.”
