U.S. employers collectively spend an estimated $1.7 billion each year to prevent their workers from unionizing, according to a new report from the nonpartisan Economic Policy Institute and nonprofit watchdog group LaborLab.
The $1.7 billion figure includes spending on law firms such as Littler Mendelson that specialize in so-called “union avoidance” services, as well as an estimated $442 million on professional anti-union consultants who are contracted by employers to directly persuade workers against unionization, often at rates of $400-plus an hour or upward of $3,000 per day.
Federal records indicate that several of the most active union avoidance consultants in the U.S. are based in Central Florida — or at least affiliate their consultancy firms with Florida-based addresses. Some of these consultants rake in millions of dollars each year from big companies like Amazon, which reportedly spent at least $26 million on union avoidance consultants in 2025 alone.
“It is well documented that employers often hire union avoidance consultants to dissuade and weaken workers’ unionization efforts,” the new report’s authors note. “These consultants work to prevent a union election from taking place — and if that fails, to ensure that workers vote against the union and then stall negotiations over a first collective bargaining agreement.”
These anti-union consultants — and other employer representatives — have historically been caught lying to workers during organizing drives, collecting workers’ sensitive personal information, weaponizing racial and ethnic differences to sow divisions in the workforce, and in some cases, even threatening to have immigrant workers deported over their organizing activity. For decades, they’ve been paid the big bucks to bust unions for small businesses, nonprofits and multinational corporations alike.
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RoadWarrior Productions, for instance, a union avoidance firm based out of Florida’s Space Coast (and a virtual WeWork office in Washington, D.C.), reported being paid nearly $8 million by Amazon last year to thwart unionization efforts at various Amazon facilities in California, New York, North Carolina, Michigan, Indiana, Massachusetts, Nevada, Illinois and Pennsylvania.
“Amazon lies like the rest of us breathe air.”
The firm, led by CEO Russell Brown, does most of its work through individual subcontractors, many of whom are also based in Florida. One of the firm’s subcontracted consultants, Jared Rodriguez, is a sitting city council member in the small Florida city of Layton, as Orlando Weekly reported last year.
Federal records show Rodriguez, a former Michigander and longtime anti-union advocate in Michigan state politics, was paid nearly $20,000 in 2025 to dissuade organizing activity at an Amazon facility in New Jersey a year earlier, before his appointment to a seat on Layton City Council in South Florida.
Amazon also paid Labor Advisors, another union avoidance firm based out of Delray Beach, about $345,000 for its consultant services in 2025. Most of these anti-union gigs targeted organizing drives involving the Teamsters.
“Amazon would rather pay third-party interlopers to threaten, intimidate and harass the very people who make the company successful, when it could simply bargain with its workforce and respect their federally protected right to seek union representation,” Matthew McQuaid, a Teamsters spokesperson, told Orlando Weekly in a statement.
“The malicious union busters this trillion-dollar behemoth hires have been found guilty of violating federal law on numerous occasions, and the millions of dollars that it spends on these shameless hacks is money wasted,” McQuaid added.
More than 10,000 Amazon workers have organized with the Teamsters in recent years, according to the union, including at facilities directly targeted by Florida-based union avoidance professionals.
“Amazon lies like the rest of us breathe air, which is why it has lost all credibility in the eyes of its employees and they are standing up and fighting back all across the country,” McQuaid said.
Under the federal Labor Management Reporting and Disclosure Act of 1959, anti-union consultants — also known as “persuaders” — are required to file reports with the U.S. Department of Labor, disclosing the details of jobs they enter into with employers to persuade workers against organizing a union.
These reports, known as LM20s, must be filed within 30 days of entering into an agreement. As Orlando Weekly has previously reported, consultants will often file deficient reports, file them months or years late, or even neglect to file them altogether. Some use fake names, include typos, or list the wrong state or ZIP code for their business addresses.
The difference between filing accurate information and filing a deficient report matters, according to pro-union advocates.
“This is all about protecting a fundamental legal and constitutional right to organize,” LaborLab executive director Bob Funk previously told Orlando Weekly in an interview. “And without this information, employers and union-busters can hide in the shadows.”
A number of players
Other active union avoidance firms in Central Florida include The Labor Pros, based in Orlando, which brought in $667,906 last year, according to the firm’s annual financial disclosure report. Bridge Labor Solutions, based in Altamonte Springs, hasn’t reported its earnings for 2025, but has disclosed high-paying jobs for various healthcare clients last year, including the Long Island Jewish Medical Center and Burke Rehabilitation Hospital, both of which are based in New York.
Unboxted, another Orlando-based firm, similarly hasn’t reported its 2025 earnings, in a potential violation of federal reporting requirements. (Perfectly in character for a firm opposed to proper reporting, Unboxted’s website lacks a valid security certificate and many browsers will not open it.) The company did report union avoidance gigs performed last year for employers such as LabCorp, one of the top union avoidance spenders of 2025, according to the LaborLab and EPI report. The firm is led by Sean Lyles, a self-described “business strategist with nearly 30 years of experience in corporate America,” with past clients that include the Walt Disney World Resort and Tesla, according to his website.
Valens Business Services, a Winter Garden-based firm led by a former HR manager for what used to be known as Disney’s Reedy Creek Improvement District, similarly neglected to fully report its 2025 earnings for union avoidance work in its annual financial disclosure report.
Its CEO, Tracy Schrey, reported jobs last year for Long Island Jewish Medical Center and AEG Vision, targeting organizing activity among registered nurses in New York and optical technicians in Lima, Ohio. Both organizing drives were ultimately unsuccessful for the unions, according to records kept by the National Labor Relations Board, which oversees private sector union elections.
A fuller picture
But these consultants are only one piece of the union avoidance pie.
The EPI and LaborLab report also, for the first time, calculates the estimated cost of union avoidance services sought through law firms that specialize in union deterrence, such as Littler Mendelson, Jackson Lewis and Morgan Lewis. Under a loophole in federal labor law, these law firms are not required to publicly disclose their earnings for providing legal advice to employers for union avoidance purposes, unless they directly interact with rank-and-file workers (management employees are excluded).
“Union avoidance law firms have taken full advantage of this reporting loophole and have constructed an industry providing counsel on union busting,” the report states. These firms, charging hundreds or even more than $1,000 per hour, have represented employers involved in some of the largest and most militant organizing efforts over the last decade, including organizing drives at Starbucks, Amazon, McDonald’s and Trader Joe’s.
“If they really care that much about us, they’d be paying us a lot more rather than paying a bunch of union-busting lawyers to feed lines to our management,” a Trader Joe’s worker at a store in Boulder, Colorado, told The Guardian in a 2022 interview.
The total spending on union avoidance services is telling.
Public support for labor unions is at a near-record high, according to the latest Gallup polling — nearly 70 percent of Americans say they support unions. Even in Florida and much of the “anti-union” Southern region of the U.S., where union membership rates are low, workers such as truck drivers have faced off against professional union busters — and won.
“That money could have been well-suited to take care of us,” said Arte Hoffman, a driver for Breakthru Beverages in Orlando, who wasn’t impressed after learning his employer had spent more than $375,000 in 2024 to convince him and his co-workers across Florida to vote against organizing a union. “Put it towards the people who take care of your business,” Hoffman added.
Beyond the shop floor
More than 16 million workers in the U.S. had union representation in 2025, according to federal data, representing about 11 percent of the total U.S. workforce. Research has found that benefits of union representation can include higher average earnings, compared to non-union counterparts, as well as a greater likelihood of having access to benefits like paid leave and retirement benefits.
And while billionaire-funded think tanks like Americans for Prosperity have played a documented role in efforts to undermine labor and collective bargaining rights on a state and federal level, the new report notes that union avoidance professionals have dipped their own toes into the water of this policy battle, too.
“Workers deserve to know the deck is being stacked against them at every level, and that there is a traceable, accountable industry behind it.”
Littler Mendelson, for instance, has a Workplace Policy Institute that serves as the firm’s “government relations and public policy arm,” according to its website. Through WPI, the firm boasts its contribution to stifling progress on the pro-union Protect the Right to Organize Act, a federal policy proposal supported by unions. It also helped combat a bill in California that sought to address the costly misclassification of full-time workers as independent contractors. The bill, California Assembly Bill 5, was ultimately passed and signed into law in 2019.
Florida’s union busters have also demonstrated an appetite for policy work. Russell “Russ” Brown and Jared Rodriguez, both affiliated with the union avoidance firm RoadWarrior Productions (also known as RWP Labor) also serve on a leadership level for the Center for Independent Employees, a legal defense organization that “is dedicated to protecting employee freedom from union interference in the workplace.”
The organization, based in South Carolina, claimed partial credit for helping to “craft” Florida’s Senate Bill 256, an anti-union law passed by the Florida Legislature and signed by Gov. Ron DeSantis in 2023 that made it more difficult for most public employees to pay union dues, while simultaneously requiring more of them to pay union dues in order to keep their unions certified.
“It’s a good day for parents, for students, for teachers, and for a wide swath of public employees. The governor’s signature represents a masterstroke for a higher-functioning public sector and a more just Florida,” Brown shared in a statement after DeSantis signed the bill into law.
Funk, with LaborLab, believes Brown’s diverse array of activities to undermine unions is telling. “When an organization affiliated with active union avoidance consultants takes partial credit for crafting that law, it tells you exactly who it was written to benefit,” he told the Weekly.
Another one of RWP Labor’s former consultants, Rusty Brown (it’s not immediately clear whether the two Browns are related, but they are not the same person), directly lobbied for Florida’s SB 256 and an anti-union Florida law that passed this year (SB 1296) as a lobbyist for the Freedom Foundation, a billionaire-funded think tank.
Funk argued that although the $1.7 billion figure captured in LaborLab and EPI’s new report is striking, “the deeper story is about the infrastructure corporate America has built: a well-funded industry working in legislators’ rooms and in the workplace.”
“Workers deserve to know the deck is being stacked against them at every level, and that there is a traceable, accountable industry behind it.”
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