Brightline’s onboard attendants vote to form first Brightline union in Florida

Roughly 100 onboard attendants employed by the for-profit passenger rail line Brightline in Florida voted to unionize with the Transport Workers Union on Wednesday. Their action is a push to address safety issues and fight for higher pay and better job benefits, including improved sick leave.

It’s the first union formed by Brightline workers in the state of Florida, and the largest newly organized group of railroad workers nationwide in over 20 years, according to TWU.

Although an official vote tally wasn’t immediately shared by the union — and the National Mediation Board declined to comment — a statement from the union notes that workers voted in favor of unionization by a roughly two-to-one margin.

Union president John Samuelsen described the results in a statement as an “enormous victory.” The Transport Workers Union represents roughly 155,000 workers across the United States in the airline, rail, transit, university and utility sectors, including flight attendants for airlines like Southwest.

“Brightline workers — in the face of an aggressive anti-union campaign — voted roughly two to one to join the TWU,” said Samuelsen. “The Brightline president even went so far as to call workers at home in an apparent intimidation tactic. It obviously failed, epically.”

Brightline, a privately owned passenger railroad, has operated a rail line running from Orlando to Miami since 2023. The union first announced a historic organizing drive among Brightline’s onboard attendants last August, after Brightline reached an agreement the year before with labor unions on the West Coast to use highly skilled union workers to help build and maintain a planned 218-mile high-speed rail project running from Las Vegas to Southern California.

Despite the friendly relationship on the West Coast, however, Brightline played hardball after onboard attendants here in Florida — a state with a below-average union membership rate — publicly announced plans to unionize.

According to email communications the union shared with Orlando Weekly, Brightline responded to workers’ union drive by hiring lawyers from the notorious union avoidance law firm Littler Mendelson, and internally communicating to workers that they would prefer Brightline to remain union-free.

Drawn straight from Littler Mendelson’s list of union avoidance strategies, Brightline president Patrick Goddard emailed Brightline employees, informing them that while it is their “right” to seek union representation, he believed a “direct relationship” with employees — without a union — is “in the best interest of all of us.”

Brightline also tried to delay the workers’ union election by arguing that they weren’t under the jurisdiction of the National Mediation Board, a labor agency that oversees labor relations in the rail and airline sectors. Although Brightline is clearly a rail company and has received tens of millions of dollars in federal grants earmarked specifically for rail companies, Brightline (incredibly) argued that they weren’t a railroad after all.

The union called foul and asked for the federal Department of Transportation to refuse to give Brightline any more public money as long as they continued to pretend they were not a passenger rail line.

The NMB ruled in favor of the union, and against Brightline’s argument — and ordered the election to move forward in November. Voting lasted two months, from late November through Tuesday, Jan. 14.

“Brightline ran an ugly anti-union, anti-worker campaign against their own workforce, but let’s put that behind us,” Samuelsen, the union president, shared Tuesday.

“We’re committed to working to ensure the railroad is successful while helping our newest members secure better wages, better working conditions, respect in the workplace, and other goals that they set.”

Brightline has been the subject of some scrutiny for deadly crashes involving its passenger cars. According to Treasure Coast newspaper TC Palm, there have been at least six fatalities involving Brightline’s rail on Florida’s Treasure Coast alone since the rail line began running in September 2023. At least one person was injured in a collision between a Brightline train and a car in North Miami Beach just last week.

“As opposed to other rail operators, Brightline has an indifference to its workforce after the trauma that comes when a Brightline train runs somebody over,” Samuelsen told the Palm Beach Post last year.

The motivation to unionize, Samuelsen previously told Orlando Weekly, “is similar to every other work group that seeks to unionize: to build collective power in a workplace.”

He also shared that other Brightline workers, beyond just the onboard attendants who help with luggage and other food and beverage services, have reached out to the union to ask if they could organize to join the union, too.

As for the onboard attendants, the next step is to form a union negotiating committee of workers to begin negotiating a first contract with Brightline.

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This article appears in Jan 8-14, 2025.