relevant chomsky is Old Wine, New Bottles:

"Typically, unions are presented as anti-worker organizations. The typical movie about unions is something like On the Waterfront, where Marlon Brando is the heroic worker who stands up against the corrupt union and defends the workers against the union; that's the hero. The unions are an alien element which tried to break up our harmony and harm the workers, and you gotta protect yourself from them. That's the theme that goes all the way through.

Consciously designed, incidentally. Very interesting business propaganda about this in the late 1930s. Business was terrified when American workers finally got the rights that they'd had in Europe sixty years earlier, namely the right to organize, and they won their first legislative victory, the Wagner Act which gave them the right to organize -- first and last legislative victory. Business was terrified, there was all kinds of frenzied discussion in the business journals. [...] And the main technique was to use public relations methods -- I mean they also continued to use force, workers still got killed -- but the main idea was to use public relations techniques, propaganda, to try to create an image of us vs. them. In fact, it was called the Johnstown Valley formula; it worked so well in breaking steel strikes in the late thirties. The Mohawk Valley formula [started] in Johnstown Valley, Pennsylvania. The idea was to present an image of us vs. them, where us is the sober worker with his lunch-pail, the housewife you know preparing dinner, the hard-working executive toiling sixteen hours a day for the benefit of everybody, the honest editor turning out the truth. That's us; we're all in harmony. And then there's them, you know these aliens, these outsiders who are disrupting our harmony and are anti-American, and this and that and the other thing, and you present these images in the press and in those days the radio, nowadays television, and the pulpit and so on and so forth, and you can kind of mobilize the public, they hoped, and it succeeded very often, into defending us and our harmony, the harmony of the worker and the executive, against them, the outsiders who are trying to disrupt. That's the formula that's produced, and it runs through a whole long period of public propaganda. By that I mean things, everything from comic strips to movies to, these days, television, and so on. Well, that's one of the techniques for controlling the public mind."

also avail on mp3