Littler Mendelson
U.S.-based law firm
Littler Mendelson P.C. (often known as Littler) is an American multinational law firm specializing in labor law. The company is known for its union busting practices, acting on behalf of business management against organized labor efforts, and is the largest law firm for union avoidance in the United States. Founded in 1942 in San Francisco, the firm expanded nationwide in the late 1990s and internationally in the 2010s, and has 100 offices in 28 countries.
Littler has advised its clients to use a variety of strategies to obstruct unionization, including captive audience meetings, anti-union messaging, and delaying union elections. The firm and its in-house lobbying group, the Workplace Policy Institute (WPI), have opposed laws and policies that would ease unionization and shield workers seeking union recognition from employer retaliation.
Littler has represented organisations including Amazon, Apple, Delta Air Lines, Nissan, Starbucks, Trader Joe's, Volkswagen, and the Wikimedia Foundation.
History
Littler Mendelson was founded in the San Francisco Bay Area in 1942, when the National War Labor Board was active in mediating labor disputes, and dedicated its practice to advising employers on unionization and collective bargaining issues. Beginning in the 1960s, Littler pivoted away from union substitution (the act of providing non-union employees with similar benefits as union employees to discourage unionization) and started deploying more aggressive strategies to suppress union formation. The firm broadened its scope to encompass other areas of employment law in the 1970s in response to decreased union membership, a plan spearheaded by named partners Wesley Fastiff and Garry Mathiason. Littler remained local to the Bay Area until the 1990s, when it expanded throughout the US via mergers and acquisitions.
“Littler Mendelson” enters the record as u.S.-based law firm. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Littler, Mendelson and -based can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Chronology, provenance and viewpoint should be read together before a broad social or political interpretation is accepted. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 13, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q6653038. VIAF identifies the subject as 138549912. The Library of Congress control number is n97106947. 1 of 5 selected statements include explicit references; 3 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1942.
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This entry incorporates text from “Littler Mendelson” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.