The next time someone holds forth on the competitive advantage that accrues to US business because the US is a "society based on law," the obvious corrective would be to mention the advantage that accrues to capital precisely because the law is simply ignored in regard to labor issues. Enforcement of labor complaints has been awful--and getting worse--for decades, and this article from The Nation discusses a new study that "measure[s] for the first time the effect of decades of deteriorating labor standards and slack enforcement."
That reminded me of this recent study, by labor scholar Kate Bronfenbrenner (who was kind enough to talk to Dollars and Sense on the state of the labor market two years ago), which documents the increasing intensity of employers in fighting unionization drives, often by employing techniques that are of dubious legality.