DAVID BURKE insists he is not antiunion – in fact, he is a former union man. The chairman and president of Burke Group said his company never maligned unions in Britain. However, he appreciated why many companies did not want them. “The restrictions that they have on jobs, their inflexibility and their politics are very dysfunctional,” he said.

Burke Group, which Burke founded in 1982, is a new sort of HR consultancy that arrived in Britain eight years ago. Based in California, it describes itself as the largest American management consultancy that special-ises “in union avoidance and preventative industrial labour relations”. It employs more than 60 consultants, including a representative in Britain.

Most of the companies seeking Burke Group’s help want to swing an employee ballot against union recognition. If 40% vote in favour of recognition, their union gains legal rights, including the right to negotiate on pay, hours and holidays.

The work of Burke Group and other American union-avoidance firms has been controversial in Britain, prompting protests and headlines about “union busting”. Any suggestion that underhand tactics have been used in Britain was flatly rejected, however, by its owner. “If you try to pressure employees, they are guaranteed to vote for the union,” said Burke. His consultants simply presented the facts about union recognition.

Cable & Wireless turned to Burke Group when faced with a bid for recognition by the Communications Workers Union for its 360 field engineers. Simon Broome, HR director, said the company felt a recognised union would undermine the work of its in-house Employee Consultation Forum.

Burke Group was called in to guide the company through the statutory recognition process, briefing managers and running workshops for HR.

The union recognition ballot has yet to be held.

“We employed Burke Group because of its knowledge of the legislation and its experience in helping to manage employee communications in these situations,” said Broome.

Nevertheless, the Communication Workers Union has voiced concern about Burke Group’s tactics, claiming they made it difficult to establish any trust with the company.

Burke Group gained its first British job within a month of the legislation that formalised union-recognition ballots in 2000. Word-of-mouth reports among HR professionals and employment lawyers has produced a steady stream of work for the consultancy, with clients including GE Caledonian, T-Mobile and Honeywell.

Burke said his long-term goal was to identify why employees felt the need for collective representation and then advise employers on what they had to do to head off discontent.

“Frequently, it is not about money; it’s about daily work or getting a response from management,” said Burke. “But if you don’t fix those issues, all you have done is delay the inevitable employee unrest.”

Union-avoidance consultancies are undoubtedly effective. The messages they communicate to staff, through meetings, vid-eos, letters and even, in America, through baseball caps, T-shirts and popcorn buckets carrying antiunion slogans, hit home.

Burke Group claims to have won 96% of the 800 recognition ballots with which it has been involved – predominantly in America – and British unions admit losing almost every vote in such circumstances.

The consultancies usually take union organisers by surprise.

The Graphical Print and Media Union was unaware of Burke Group’s involvement when faced with the most aggressive and “serious professional resistance” it had ever encountered during a recognition drive at Amazon’s Milton Keynes distribution centre.

John Logan, lecturer in employment relations at the London School of Economics and author of a recent report on antiunion consultants, commissioned by the Trades Union Congress, said they preferred to work in the background.

“If a firm decides to use a consultancy to aggressively fight the union, it’s likely that human resources will be drawn in to run the show while the consultant stays in the background, telling them what to do,” he said.

In America, he said, union busting was a multi-billion-dollar business. Logan said employers with no previous history of union recognition were often strongly opposed to it, fearful that they would be giving up control. He warned, though, that hiring such consultancies could have damaging consequences.

“An antiunion campaign can poison the relationship between employees and employers,” he said. “It is essential that union busting is not allowed to flourish on this side of the Atlantic.”

More than 6.5m people are members of unions affiliated to the TUC – 28% of the British workforce.

Paul Nowak, national organiser at the TUC, said that in the overwhelming majority of cases relations between employer and union were positive. “Running a successful business means having staff who feel they have a voice at work and unions provide an effective way of doing that,” he said.

Tesco has a partnership agreement with the shop workers’ union Usdaw under which union representatives are consulted at all levels. Hayley Tatum, the retailer’s UK operation personnel director, said: “We want to work in a very progressive relationship with the unions, looking at what’s right for the company and what’s right for the people who work for it.” Andy Cook, managing director of the HR consultancy Mar-shall James, said a whole generation of HR officers lacked experience of dealing with unions. He also said that using a union-avoidance consultancy could lead to problems later.

“These people are good at what they do, running quite aggressive campaigns about how bad the unions are,” he said. “But how do you create good employee relations after a campaign which argues that we don’t want you to exercise your democratic right to have a union?”