Miami Airport car rental company hired anti-union Orlando firm to hamper union organizing efforts | Orlando

Under federal law, these union-busting labor consultants — dubbed “union busters” by critics — are required to file disclosure reports when they enter into contracts with employers. They must also disclose how much they make for the work, which is often thousands, sometimes millions of dollars in total.

Records show that Sixt Rent A Car, a multi-billion dollar international car rental company, faced a union drive this summer organized by its sales employees at Miami Airport in South Florida, one of the busiest air hubs in the United States.

A majority of workers asked the company to recognize their desire to join Teamsters Local 769. This union represents just over 14,000 workers in Florida, including car rental employees at companies such as Avis/Budget and Fox Rent-A-Car at Miami and Fort Lauderdale airports.

Instead, Sixt called for a union election for its 32 employees in late June and rejected the workers’ request to join the union without such an election. Still, the company – which had already experienced an unsuccessful union campaign at Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport – was not inclined to join the Teamsters at the bargaining table without a fight.

A disclosure report from CEO Nunn shows that the company engaged her firm’s services on June 16, 2024, just five days before it filed its petition for a union election with the National Labor Relations Board. As part of the two parties’ agreement, the rental car company reportedly agreed to pay the labor pros $425 per hour per workday, “plus travel expenses,” according to her report.

Nunn, a longtime labor lawyer who has been hired in the past by companies such as Hilton Hotels and Guitar Center, said her firm was hired by Sixt Rent-A-Car to “educate” the company’s sales representatives about their union rights.

While Nunn did not respond to an emailed request for an explanation of this work, that language is generally code for one-on-one or group meetings with a “captive audience.” These outside consultants hold these meetings with workers, a costly and often misleading ploy to portray unions as unnecessary, outdated and a third party making false promises.

The records show that the Labor Pros union specifically hired one of its Hollywood, Florida-based consultants – Luis Alvarez – for the job in the South, which lasted just over a month, from June 16 through the July 25 union election date.

According to the National Labor Relations Board, auto salesmen ultimately voted 12 to 19 against forming a union at Teamsters Local 769. Local 769 union officials, including sales representatives, organizers and the local’s president, declined to comment or did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

A multi-million dollar industry

Union registrations among U.S. workers seeking to organize have soared in recent years, fueled by a pro-worker National Labor Relations Board under the Biden administration and grassroots unionization campaigns at companies like Amazon and Starbucks. Public support for unions—and the desire of many nonunion workers to join one—is also higher than it has been in decades, despite an overall decline in union density.

Employers who do not want to be exposed to the “threat” of union formation can turn to the union avoidance industry – a shady network of anti-union consultants and employer-side law firms.

Union avoidance is a multimillion-dollar industry in which consultants present themselves to employers as a viable solution to union struggles. Professional union busters – some of whom are based in Florida – are paid between $200 and $400 an hour or thousands of dollars a day, depending on their agreement with employers.

Some of them are former union organizers who later switched sides, so to speak, or were thrown out of their unions due to allegations of corruption, embezzlement, or electoral fraud in internal union elections.

Alvarez, the consultant hired to “train” Sixt’s Miami employees, is a longtime labor lawyer who was also hired in 2022 to crush a Local 769 union campaign. Ryder, a transportation and logistics company, hired Alvarez and former union organizer and current persuasion campaigner Lupe Cruz to convince the company’s drivers that they didn’t need a union.

Both men appear to be frequently hired to organize campaigns among Hispanic and Latino workers, participating in one aspect of the union-avoiding industry’s documented efforts to become more diverse, and teaching employers how to use the language of diversity to fight union formation – despite the benefits unions can have for people of color and women in the workforce.

Union avoidance is a multimillion-dollar industry that sells itself to employers as a solution to unionization efforts.

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Nunn said this focus on diversity was part of a broader strategy to portray unions as unnecessary.

“People form unions against bad managers, not bad companies,” Nunn told The Intercept in 2022. “People work for companies where they feel valued and included. So if that’s a tactic of not having a union, so be it.”

Unlike the recent union drive by Sixt workers, Alvarez and Cruz were unsuccessful in their Ryder job, according to union election results. Workers in that case voted 17-12 to unionize with the Teamsters, and the company experienced more union drives in other parts of the country the following year. The company still paid Alvarez and Cruz more than $93,000 for the failed effort.

The union-friendly media and organisation project Work notes documented another assignment the two worked on together last February, which involved a union organizing drive among predominantly Latino workers at Lodi, a popular restaurant near New York’s Rockefeller Center.

Alvarez reportedly introduced himself to workers there under a false name (“Luis Medina”), and one worker claimed in a press release that consultants told Spanish-speaking workers not to “trust English speakers in the union because the English speakers were trying to confuse us,” according to Labor Notes.

According to an unfair labor practice complaint filed with the NLRB and received by Orlando weeklyConsultants hired by the employer also “suggested” to restaurant employees that the union process “could have a negative impact on their immigration status.” The consultants, whose names are redacted in the complaint, were also accused of “using racial bias to discourage employees from joining or supporting the union.”

Lodi workers ultimately voted 21-26 against forming a Restaurant Workers Union last March, but several unfair labor practice complaints filed against the restaurant with the NLRB remain open or under investigation.

Although hiring such consultants is not illegal under federal law, threatening a loss of benefits, pay, or other consequences as a result of unionization is illegal. The same is true of promising preferential treatment or better pay if you vote against unionization.

Sixt, the car rental company that hired Labor Pros in June, did not respond to a request for Orlando weekly on its decision to hire the company, which has a history of being late in filing its mandatory disclosure reports with the Ministry of Labor and has been involved in alleged labor law violations.

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