Amazon paid anti-union consultants in Central Florida hundreds of thousands of dollars in 2023 (2024)

According to the report filed, both were specifically directed “to educate employees on their rights under the [National Labor Relations Act],” which is generally code for holding anti-union meetings with employees, also known as “captive audience” meetings.

Workers have described these meetings as coercive in nature; they are held during employees’ work hours (causing disruption to workflow) and are specifically meant to spook workers away from the idea of forming or joining a labor union to advocate for better wages and working conditions.

According to a separate report filed by the same firm in December, Butler and Carter were two of seven consultants contracted by the firm in 2023 to carry out their agreements with Amazon, which vaguely list several facilities or types of facilities as targets.

The company explained in their own report to the U.S. Department of Labor that the firm was retained “in response to large scale union organizing efforts, including to assist us in expressing the companys [sic] opinion on union representation, and to educate employees about the issues, election process and their rights under the law.”

The individual consultants assigned to each facility are not clarified.

According to reports filed, the Seattle-based retail company paid the Rayla Group alone $1.3 million in 2023 to deliver its anti-union messaging to employees.

But Amazon also contracted the services of four other so-called “union avoidance” consultancy firms — including Road Warrior Productions (aka RWP Labor), a union-busting firm headquartered in Satellite Beach, Florida.

The company — which reported net sales of $578 billion last year — has faced multiple union organizing drives in New York, Alabama and other states across the country (not including Florida) in recent years.

The company ran a scorched-earth union-busting campaign in Bessemer — which consultant Nekeya Nunn of the Orlando-based Labor Pros was also rumored (but not confirmed) to have worked on, according to professor John Logan, who serves as director of Labor and Employment Studies at San Francisco State University.

So far, the Staten Island warehouse is the only unionized Amazon site in the country. Subcontracted drivers for Amazon in California, employed through one of the company’s delivery partners, also unionized with the Teamsters last year but have similarly faced difficulties in talks with the company, including job terminations.

The warehouse workers in Staten Island are still without a union contract, two years after their historic win, and internal conflict within the union has complicated efforts to build and sustain solidarity amid roadblocks put up by their employer.

The address simply does not exist

Butler, the anti-union consultant reportedly based in Orlando (you'll get why we say that in a minute), was paid $78,389 last year by the Rayla Group to “educate” Amazon employees about their union rights, records show. Carter, his business partner based in Clermont, was paid $44,569.

Amazon had different agreements for the group, spanning different facilities and different lengths of time, so it’s not unusual to see one consultant paid less or more than another.

What’s odd is: The address listed for Butler — 1584 Montane St. in Orlando — does not exist within city limits, nor does the ZIP code of 31118 listed for the address.

That ZIP code doesn’t appear to exist at all, in Central Florida or otherwise.

The same Orlando address is listed for Butler in another persuader report filed by a different anti-union firm, while several other reports share an address for him in Clermont that matches the address he and Carter have registered with the state for their joint business, Butler Carter Connection.

There is a 1584 Montana Ave. in Orlando, in the Colonialtown North neighborhood, but that’s a different ZIP code than what’s reported, and it’s not home to any sort of property, according to county records, let alone a business setup. Butler’s LinkedIn profile lists his city as Jacksonville.

Under the Labor-Management Reporting and Disclosure Act (LMRDA), outside labor consultants (or “persuaders”) contracted by employers are required to file federal reports known as LM-20s and LM-21s with the U.S. Department of Labor, disclosing the details of their contractual arrangements.

These reports are often, accidentally or not, riddled with errors. Many consultants file their reports late, insert typos, use fake names, or file reports with information missing, such as the classification of workers they are interacting with, and the financial details of their arrangements — i.e., their rate of pay.

Experts expect there’s also “persuader” activity that isn’t reported at all — by either consultants or employers, who are similarly required to file annual reports for any agreements they enter into with anti-union persuaders and how much they pay them.

Butler, for his part, hasn’t filed a single report disclosing his own persuader activity himself. This is despite being listed in several financial disclosure reports filed by union avoidance firms he contracted with, including the Rayla Group — which lists its address as what looks to be a post office box at a UPS office in Michigan.

Carter has filed two of her own reports, but not for the Amazon job. She was also paid last year to try and convince registered nurses at dialysis clinics in California not to unionize with the Service Employees International Union (SEIU).

The greater Orlando area is home to a surprisingly high number of “union avoidance” outfits and individual consultants who have been hired by the likes of Hilton Hotels, Barnes & Noble College Bookstores, Lowe’sand Amy’s Kitchen to prevent employees from unionizing.

Tracy Schrey, a former HR manager for what used to be known as Disney's Reedy Creek district, was enlisted for a job in 2021 to prevent Dollar General workers in Barkhamsted, Connecticut, from joining the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW).

A judge for the federal labor board last year said Dollar General violated federal labor law during that campaign by wrongfully firing a worker and allegedly threatening to close the store if workers unionized (thus, illegally threatening their job security for exercising their protected right to organize).

Schrey, who works out of Winter Garden, Florida, served as a manager for the Reedy Creek special tax district (now known as the Central Florida Tourism Oversight District) until she was fired in 2018. She currently sits on the West Orange Habitat for Humanity's board of directors.

As Orlando Weekly reported last year, consultants contracted by the Orlando-based Labor Pros firm, based in downtown Orlando, allegedly compared union membership to “chattel slavery” and “Jim Crow” during meetings with employees of a Barnes & Noble college bookstore at Rutgers University, according to an assistant store manager who was supportive of the union effort.

Workers there unanimously voted to unionize, despite weaponized language that the assistant store manager described to Orlando Weekly last year as “jarring.”

Union-busting is a lucrative, decades-old industry, worth billions of dollars. Some consultants in the industry today are ex-union leaders themselves who switched sides, sometimes after being kicked out of their unions for undemocratic (and/or illegal) practices.

This experience within the labor movement gives those former union staffers unique leverage in their pitches to employers that are desperate to thwart the “threat of unionization,” as former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz put it.

Public support for labor unions in the U.S. is at a near-record high, despite the fact that 90 percent of workers in the United States aren’t union members, and the percentage of union membership has declined over the past several decades.

A 2017 poll found that nearly 50 percent of nonunion workers said they would vote for union representation, but decades of anti-union labor policy — especially in southern, “nonunion” states like Florida — have made the job of organizing harder.

Organizing campaigns at companies like Amazon, Starbucks and Trader Joe’s (another union buster) have inspired workers, particularly younger workers in difficult-to-organize sectors like restaurants and hospitality, to consider organizing for improvements on the job.

The National Labor Relations Board, the federal agency overseeing private sector union matters, on Tuesday shared that the number of petitions filed for union elections in the first six months of the current fiscal year rose 35 percent year-over-year.

TitleII of the Labor-Management Reporting and Disclosure Act (LMRDA)requires covered labor organizations, officers and employees of unions,employers, labor relations consultants and suretycompanies to file certain reports with Office of Labor-ManagementStandards (OLMS). As it relates to the consultant Forms LM-20 andLM-21, filers must provide the full name of all persons identified,including that of the persons engaging in the reportableactivities, as identified in Form LM-20, Item 11(d) (Name(s) andAddress(es) through whom the activity was performed). Initials andabbreviations or coded versions of names are not acceptable. See theForm LM-20 Common Errors Fact Sheet. The individual(s) required tosign Form LM-20 and LM-21 are personally responsible for its filingaccuracy and by signing the report they declare, under penalty andperjury, that all information submitted in the reportis true, correct, and complete.

Pursuantto the LMRDA, OLMS has civil enforcement authority of theserequirements. Additionally, the LMRDA provides criminal penalties forcertain willful violations ofthese reporting requirements, which include the willful failure to filereports; failure to maintain required records; false statements ofmaterial facts and omissions of material facts; and false entries inbooks, records, reports, and statements requiredto be kept by the LMRDA. See LMRDA Section 209.

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