Worker Interests Are Not the Same as Corporate Interests

Article • Expose the Heist: Power and Policy in Unprecedented Times

Worker Interests Are Not the Same as Corporate Interests

Mar 10, 2026

A worker in a hard hat and a person in a suit walk in opposite directions on a textured red background, symbolizing contrast and diversity.

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Karen Harned, president of Harned Strategies LLC and a senior fellow at the Institute for the American Worker (I4AW), has written one of the greatest works of gaslighting in recent memory. Her op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, “The National Labor Relations Board Gets a Makeover,” lauds the dismantling of the National Labor Relations Board as a victory for workers.

Harned is not writing in a vacuum. The Trump administration has moved faster and further to dismantle federal labor protections than any administration in modern history — firing the NLRB board chair, defunding enforcement, and systematically stripping the agency of its ability to protect workers. Organizations like I4AW exist to provide that project with a language US workers might actually believe.

To understand what I4AW actually stands for, look no further than its president, Vincent Vernuccio, who during a Senate committee meeting on labor law reform argued that “workers should work for themselves without government mandates putting them in a box.” The word mandate is doing serious work here. It’s left vague enough to trigger fear but specific enough to signal to the right audience that their choice might be taken away.

Arguments like Vernuccio’s, or Harned’s, aren’t really addressing genuine acts of government overreach, like threatening to eliminate the Women’s Bureau in the Department of Labor or carrying out mass layoffs of federal workers. Often, what they frame as oppressive ‘mandates’ are actually policies that benefit workers — like a higher federal minimum wage, a stable 40-hour workweek, paid leave, or expanding employee classification so workers traditionally deemed as independent contractors, like Amazon and Uber drivers, are no longer denied fair pay, overtime, and basic worker protections.

Institutions like I4AW are not pro-worker organizations. They are pro-business operations, dedicated to convincing workers that what’s good for their employers is good for them. They co-opt the vocabulary of rights, freedom, and fairness precisely because that rhetoric is powerful.

Karen Harned is part of this operation. Her op-ed is not an outlier; it is a page from the playbook, published in the most widely read financial newspaper in the country. Every bogus claim she makes has a purpose, and every purpose serves the same interest: keeping workers isolated, skeptical of collective power, and convinced that the policies meant to empower them would harm them.

That’s why this article deserves to be studied. It shows exactly how the arguments made against workers are constructed. What follows are some of the most harmful aspects of her argument, decoded.

Corporations Have Long Been Biased in Favor of Profits at the Expense of Workers.

Claim

Reality

"The NLRB has long been biased in favor of unions over businesses at the expense of workers."

"Workers have labored under these unjust policies for nearly a century."

The first claim frames unions and workers as having opposing interests.The Wagner Act established the NLRB to enforce and protect worker rights. This had to be established because of the overwhelming refusal by many employers to recognize unions and to ignore workers’ rights.

Despite public support for unions being at an all time high, the steady decline in unionization shows that the NLRB is not biased in favor of workers – it is a direct result of the decades-long corporate campaign to erode union power.

The second claim that ’nearly a century of unjust policies’ means the foundational right to organize itself is the problem.

This is not borne out by evidence when one considers that every other wealthy country has higher unionization rates than the US.

If federal labor protections are the problem, then the solution is their absence. Harned didn’t say it out loud. But she didn’t have to.

Employers Don’t Want to Talk, They Want to Scare You Into Rejecting Unionization at Your Workplace.

Claim

Reality

"The Biden NLRB further tilted the scales toward unions by limiting employers' ability to talk about unionization in required all-staff meetings… such meetings allow businesses to provide their side of the story."

The NLRB “could ...free employers to talk to workers about unionization."

"Required" is the operative word in the first claim. These are captive audience meetings that workers must attend or face discipline. The NLRB has ruled these as unlawful.

Companies are totally free to distribute information and have voluntary meetings.

Framing mandatory, anti-union meetings simply as "talking" erases the coercive and illegal nature of these gatherings compelled by an employer who controls your livelihood.

Research shows employers spend $400M+ per year on consultants and law firms that help them engage in union-busting efforts. "Talking" is just a euphemism for a sophisticated, highly-funded suppression industry. Meanwhile, union organizers are often unpaid volunteers working on their own time.

Union leader Chris Smalls is a prime example. In 2024, Amazon spent roughly $12.5M on “union-avoidance” consultants. Why would a corporation need to spend this money in the first place if all they want to do is have a friendly conversation?

Employers Want Transparency for Union Organizers, Not Themselves.

Claim

Reality

"Workers deserve the truth, especially since the labor law requires businesses to disclose when they hire someone to talk to workers about union organizing."

The law referenced is notoriously weak (form LM-20) — LaborLab found that over 82 percent of anti-union ‘persuaders’ violated the 30-day filing deadline, meaning workers had no idea who was running the campaign against them until it was over. The author selectively urges transparency to target unions while ignoring that employers are not required to disclose their union-busting consultants in real time or to workers directly.

Employers Aren’t Worried About Democracy; They Just Don’t Want Employees to Form Unions.

Claim

Reality

"Workers also deserve to know when a union is targeting them. The law allows unions to force an election when only 30% of workers sign cards supporting it. But that means 70% of workers can be kept in the dark until it's time to vote."

"The Biden NLRB allowed a union to be recognized based on ‘card check’ results even after a majority of workers vote against unionizing if the union can convince the NLRB that a business acted unfairly."

The author is conflating card check and the secret ballot process to make both sound sinister. The 30 percent triggers an election via secret ballot. It doesn't decide one. Every worker votes.

Card check, on the other hand, requires 51 percent of employees — the majority — to sign cards supporting unionization. The very nature of the card check process means there must be a majority to request recognition.

However, an employer that refuses to recognize that majority can be ordered by the NLRB to recognize and bargain with the union without a new election if it is found to have intimidated, threatened firings, or coerced workers during the organizing campaign.

Harned’s op-ed frames this as unions overriding democracy.

What it actually describes is the NLRB's ensuring employers who broke the law are unable to prevent elections.