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Companies Are Using Employee Survey Data to Predict — and Squash — Union Organizing
Employee survey platforms allow employers to sort groups of employees by the departments, locations, and demographics most likely to unionize
In April, Business Insider reported that Whole Foods kept tabs on stores likely to unionize through an interactive heat map based on scores derived from more than two dozen metrics. A June Vox story about Amazon’s workforce describes a similar heat map, with executives keeping tabs on potential unionization “hot spots” via a calculation that relied on employee survey data, timing of the last pay raise, and dozens of other factors.
But Amazon isn’t the only company doing this sort of work. Thanks to a glut of tech platforms that deploy sophisticated methods for collecting and analyzing employee data, pinpointing groups of employees who are likely to unionize is a capability within reach for any employer.
Though employee surveys and the data analytics applied to them are commonly used to monitor things like employee engagement and workplace culture, at least two employee survey platforms also use data collected through surveys to pinpoint the store locations, departments, and demographics of employees that are most likely…
