Under the federal Labor-Management Reporting and Disclosure Act, individuals who are hired or contracted by a company to directly “persuade” employees against unionization are required to file reports with the federal Department of Labor disclosing the details of their agreements and how much they’re being paid.
These individuals are commonly described as persuaders, union busters or labor consultants. Today, they often bill upward of $400 an hour, or thousands of dollars per day, to convince workers that forming or joining a union would be a bad idea.
“A union threat is the fastest way to sever open lines of communication between management and employees,” a webpage from the Labor Pros, a union avoidance firm in Orlando, claims. “Addressing this threat using proper legal processes protects the integrity of all parties involved.”
The Orlando-based Labor Pros, led by founder Nekeya Nunn (aka Nekeya Parks), has provided “persuader” services for companies over the years like the Guitar Center, Hilton Hotels and even the charity Goodwill, which reportedly paid the firm a rate of $3,750 per day, “including travel expenses,” last year to convince workers in Colorado not to unionize with the United Food and Commercial Workers Local 7.
Jimena Peterson, who serves as organizing director for Local 7, told Orlando Weekly in an interview that workers at Goodwill (a nonprofit that has unionized locations elsewhere) were looking for the typical things through forming a union.
They wanted better wages, job benefits and job security at their Colorado Springs store, and had about 65% of workers at the store in support of joining the union by the time they filed a petition for a union election. Under the National Labor Relations Act, you need signed cards of support from at least 30% of workers in order to file such a petition.
Once Goodwill brought the Labor Pros in, however—about a week after that petition was filed, according to federal records—Peterson said that support for the union began to dwindle. “They were telling [workers] about how they were not going to be able to talk to their supervisor anymore, they were going to pay thousands of dollars in union dues, they were going to lose what they had … you know, just the typical union-busting,” Peterson explained.
According to the National Labor Relations Board, which conducts union elections in the private sector, the workers targeted by Nunn’s team ultimately voted 42-59 against unionization. Records show Goodwill paid Nunn roughly $165,000 for the job.
And yet, despite being in business for over 20 years, the Labor Pros this year is one of several union avoidance firms based out of the Central Florida region that has not filed a financial disclosure report that the federal LMRDA requires them to submit annually.
Such reports, known as LM-21s, are meant to provide transparency and accountability, according to Bob Funk, founder and executive director of LaborLab. “One of the most damning pieces of evidence against an employer is how much they are willing to spend to silence their employees instead of investing in their employees.”
“This is all about protecting a fundamental legal and constitutional right to organize,” he said. “And without this information, employers and union busters can hide in the shadows.”
According to LaborLab’s analysis, fewer than half of the consultants and firms that were required to submit financial disclosure reports to the feds this year actually did. Out of 159 LM-21 reports that were owed to the Department of Labor—based on separate reports that were filed disclosing persuader activity—just 68 had been filed as of June 30, 2025. Of the 68 that were actually filed, 55 were filed on time, while 13 were filed late.
Under federal law, LM-21 reports need to be filed within 90 days of the end of the persuader’s fiscal year. Employers, who must file similar disclosure reports called LM-10s, are required to do the same.
Still, LaborLab’s analysis found that roughly 43% of employers named in persuaders’ initial disclosure reports (LM-20s) last year failed to file this LM-10, thereby leaving the public in the dark about how much they’d paid out to curtail the threat of unionization.
Among persuaders, the Labor Pros aren’t Central Florida’s only noncompliers. Other firms, such as Bridge Labor Solutions in Altamonte Springs, D&G Creative Consulting in Kissimmee, Millennium Labor Consulting Solutions in Orlando and consultant Niles Commer of Employee & Management Labor Relations in Sarasota, have also failed to file their federally mandated financial disclosure reports as of publication, despite reporting union avoidance jobs performed for employers last year. Wildine Pierre Barrett, manager of Bridge Labor Solutions in Altamonte Springs, was subcontracted for at least six jobs last year, according to reports filed with the labor department.
This includes counter-campaigns to union organizing drives at the Jewish Community Center of Denver, the nonprofit Burke Rehabilitation hospital in New York, and a grocery store in Oklahoma that paid $450 per hour for Pierre and another consultant to “[p]rovide presentations, prepare written materials, and conduct meetings with management and employees to discuss information related to third-party representation and rights afforded by the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA).”
A worker involved in that campaign at Natural Grocers in Oklahoma recalled interacting with the other consultant, Miko Penn, and a second “unnamed” consultant in an interview with the Oklahoma Free Press last May. “She was very aggressive towards me,” the worker (who requested anonymity to protect their job) alleged, in describing the unnamed consultant. “I think they wanted to target me in these meetings.”
Although it’s unclear whether Barrett is the “unnamed” consultant the worker was describing, the Crossroads Group reported paying just two consultants for that job: Barrett and Penn.
Questions around these consultants’ identities (and the legality of their tactics) isn’t an isolated incident. According to Funk, “a lot” of union avoidance consultants aren’t honest about who they are and why they’ve been brought in to talk to workers.
“One of their No. 1 tactics is to say, ‘Oh, I’ve been brought in because management knows they’ve screwed up, and I’m here to fix things,’” he explained. “Well, when you look at the contracts and the spending, it becomes very clear that that is a disingenuous explanation of the work that they are doing.”
Some consultants use fake names or illegally claim that joining a union will roll back wages or benefits. Or they tell employees unionizing will do nothing to actually address problems they’re experiencing on the job. A consultant subcontracted to bust up a union drive at Tate’s Bake Shop in 2021 reportedly told their undocumented workers they could face deportation if they voted to unionize, according to Gothamist.
A Barnes & Noble College Bookstore worker in New Jersey who helped lead their own organizing drive told Orlando Weekly that they heard Labor Pros consultants had compared union membership to slavery in conversation with a Black co-worker. The workers there ended up unanimously voting in favor of unionization anyway.
The Labor Pros is POC-led and also offers diversity and inclusion training for employers, in addition to union avoidance services. (Although there’s probably less demand for those DEI services in the past year.) The firm has not responded to multiple requests for comment from Orlando Weekly since 2023.
Some of these persuaders, for their part, will defend their work publicly. Roger Allain, a former Teamsters staffer from Orlando who was kicked out of the union under questionable circumstances, recently claimed on the podcast “Survive HR” that he’s “not an anti-union guy”—even now that he’s working as union avoidance consultant, hired to persuade employees for companies like Amazon against unionization.
“What made me successful, I believe, is my passion,” said Allain, a second-generation Teamster who had previously worked jobs in construction, transportation and the entertainment industry. “What makes me even successful now that I moved to this side, right, is the passion—you’ve got to believe what you’re talking about.”
Federal records show that Allain—affiliated with the firm Rallain Consulting LLC in Land O’ Lakes—didn’t file a report disclosing his own persuader activity for companies last year either.
A report filed by consultant (and DeSantis ally) Russ Brown of Satellite Beach, however, shows Allain earned at least $61,102 from Brown’s own firm last year for five separate union avoidance jobs. One of those was targeting unionization attempts at Amazon, which reported spending nearly $13 million on union avoidance consultants last year alone.
A ‘widening divide’
While hiring union avoidance consultants by itself isn’t strictly illegal under federal labor law, these consultants are supposed to be reporting their agreements with employers to the federal Department of Labor’s Office of Labor-Management Standards, which also collects annual reports from unions. The LMRDA of 1959 was created to “eliminate or prevent improper practices” by unions, employers, and persuaders alike.The problem, according to Funk, is that enforcement on the persuader front “hasn’t been taken seriously.” We’ve reported on this before.
It’s not a new issue under the new Trump administration, and it didn’t emerge under President Joe Biden either. Noncompliance with federal reporting requirements, among both employers and union avoidance consultants, has been an issue for decades. A 1984 report from the U.S. House Education and Labor Subcommittee identified “widespread non-compliance” among employers and persuaders with the LMRDA’s disclosure requirements.
More than 40 years later, the feds are still well aware of the problem. A 2024 audit report from the DOL’s Office of Inspector General that analyzed persuader activity over a three-year period concluded that OLMS “did not effectively enforce persuader activity requirements to protect workers’ rights to unionize.”
The report notes that, due to issues like insufficient policies and procedures for monitoring persuader activity, “missing, untimely, and inaccurate reports may have negatively impacted workers from making informed decisions about unionization.”
In contrast, compliance among unions, which are similarly required to report financial information to the feds, has shown “considerable improvement” in recent years, according to LaborLab’s new report, which draws from findings of a U.S. Government Accountability Office study published in June.
“The Department of Labor has taken union compliance very seriously,” said Funk. “As you can see in our report, there’s over 20,000 unions in the country, and the vast, vast majority of them comply with [federal labor law].”
Penalties for union busters who fail to comply with reporting requirements also rarely amount to anything but a slap on the wrist. While a false report or “willful failure to file a required report” can be subject to criminal penalties under the LMRDA, the law doesn’t impose monetary penalties, and as The Prospect reported in 2022, OLMS “must file a case with a U.S. district court to get a recalcitrant employer or consultant to submit the forms.”
Peterson, the union organizing director from Colorado, said it’s important for workers to have this information about third-party consultants brought in within the window mandated by federal law. Although LM-21s from persuaders are required only annually, initial disclosures of agreements these persuaders reach with employers are required to be filed within 30 days of entering into such agreements.
“Sometimes workers are just asking for respect … and it has nothing to do with wages,” said Peterson. “But the company decided to spend their money on trying to scare their workers and misinform them and persuade them to vote no.”
Resources for workers
You can find LaborLab’s full report here and learn more about their work on laborlab.us.And if you believe persuaders have been brought into your workplace by your employer, you can report that to the DOL’s Persuader Tip Line via email at OLMS-Public@dol.gov or by calling OLMS at 202-693-0123.
Lastly, you can search the Office of Labor Management Services’ records of filings from persuaders and employers who have hired these union avoidance consultants oprs.dol.gov or olmsapps.dol.gov (both search options are kind of clunky, so be prepared for a learning curve).
This post first appeared at our sibling publication Orlando Weekly.
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This article appears in Jul 24-30, 2025.