Westinghouse Electric Corporation waged a brutal anti-union campaign against the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) in 2023 and 2024. The employer – which is owned by the private equity firm Brookfield Asset Management – hired no fewer than 12 individual anti-union consultants to undertake this campaign and paid them as much as $475 an hour plus travel expenses. In all, Westinghouse Electric Corporation seems to have shelled out close to, and perhaps more than, $1 million for their services.
Knowing about these expenditures and the services that these persuaders had been contracted to provide might have influenced the decision of workers on whether or not to vote for IBEW representation. In fact, disclosure requirements that are part of the Labor-Management Reporting and Disclosure Act (LMRDA) were enacted based on the premise that such information is essential in order for workers to fully exercise their labor rights.
But Westinghouse Electric Corporation and the consultants denied its employees those rights through a smorgasbord of apparent LRMDA violations. Due to their sheer scope and magnitude, LaborLab recently filed a special complaint with the Office of Labor-Management Standards (OLMS) over these violations.
As we write in the complaint, the wide range of violations mark “an exceptionally egregious denial” of workers’ LMRDA rights and demand “immediate corrective action.” They also underscore the gaping LMRDA compliance gap between unions on the one hand and employers and persuader consultants on the other. LaborLab recently pinpointed the size of one of these gaps. We found that while 83 percent of unions recently filed their annual LRMDA reports on time, only 34 percent of employers and 34.6 percent of consultants did.
As we suggested to OLMS, “Correcting and remediating the many instances of LMRDA non-compliance surrounding Westinghouse’s anti-union campaign is a promising place to start [closing that gap].”
One cluster of violations arising from Westinghouse’s anti-union campaign concern the failure of labor consultants to properly file the LM-20 forms that were supposed to disclose that they were hired by Westinghouse to engage in “persuader activities.”
LM-20 disclosure violations are arguably the most consequential for workers. Consultants and employers are required to file LM-20s to report the terms of any agreements under which an object thereof, “directly or indirectly,” is to persuade employees how to vote during a union election. The purpose of this requirement, as the Department of Labor has said, is to allow workers to evaluate whether the messages they are receiving during a campaign from their employer or such consultants “reflect the genuine view of their employer and supervisors about issues in their particular workplace or instead, may reflect a strategy designed by the consultant to counter union representation whenever its services are hired.” It also can cause workers to ask themselves:
“If my employer believes unionization could result in lower wages and benefits, why are they paying outside professionals so much money to prevent us from doing it?””
But as the OLMS has said, for LM-20 forms to “be meaningful,” they must be “filed close in time to the organizing activity the consultant is hired to resist” – hence, the 30-day permissible filing window. LM-20s that are filed just before, during, or after a union election takes place are meaningless.
This unfortunately was the case with the LM-20s that were filed in connection with Westinghouse’s anti-union campaign. IBEW members had no ability to see LM-20 information that was disclosed before the union election at Westinghouse began. Most LM-20s owed by consultants were filed late and after the election ended – some not at all. Two were filed in the middle of the election on the last day that they could have been filed without breaking the law (30 days after the agreement was made), providing virtually no time for the forms to be detected and disseminated before workers cast their ballots.
Another major violation our complaint highlights is Westinghouse’s failure to file an LM-10 form that discloses its total annual spending on persuaders – a violation whose remediation is essential given the IBEW’s pending unfair labor practice charges against Westinghouse. (The payments and contracted services that Westinghouse is required to disclose in an LM-10 should mirror the disclosures in the LM-20s filed by the consultants it hired.) Despite Westinghouse’s non-filing of its LM-10, annual reports known as LM-21s that were filed by two of the persuader firms Westinghouse hired – KV Information and Labor Management Associates – appear to indicate that Westinghouse paid at least a combined $836,186 to those consultancies alone, including $574,602 to KV Information and $261,584 to Labor Management Associates.
That means Westinghouse seems to have spent at least $1,337 per tallied voter ($836,186 divided by 625 total tallied voters) in the union election and at least $2,206 per tallied no voter ($836,186 divided by 379 tallied no voters). And that could be an undercount of Westinghouse’s total expenditures on union-busters. We don’t know because Westinghouse itself has yet to report how much money it spent on persuaders.
We do know that the reported figure certainly doesn’t capture the full cost that Westinghouse chose to incur by resisting IBEW’s organizing drive. It doesn’t factor in the money that Westinghouse spent on three law firms, including the notorious union-busting firm Littler Mendelson, whose standard billing rates range from $305 to $1,760 per hour. It doesn’t account for the cost of paid time spent by supervisors, HR managers and executives on prosecuting the anti-union campaign (e.g. time spent on one-on-one conversations, anti-union meetings and strategizing with consultants), rather than managing or improving business operations; and it leaves out the paid time spent by employees in anti-union union meetings and conversations with supervisors and consultants, rather than doing their jobs – not to mention the typical drop in output per hour worked that results from the organizing and counter-organizing hubbub leading up to a union election. One classic study suggests that the last three costs alone – cost of lost employee time, cost of lost executive time and productivity loss – could easily have been greater than what Westinghouse spent on anti-union consultants.
Westinghouse could have saved this money, taken the high road and paid it to workers instead. That would have been very simple: It could have agreed to voluntarily recognize IBEW as its workers’ bargaining agent after the union demonstrated majority support for this. And then it could have negotiated a collective bargaining agreement that included pay increases. Instead, Westinghouse decided to expend a huge amount of resources to sow fear and doubt among workers who – before they were targeted with messages and tactics carefully honed over decades to erode union support – had provided formal evidence that a majority of them wanted to join IBEW.
As our complaint notes, OLMS must “take swift action to correct and remediate any reporting misconduct given that such reporting will provide important context for NLRB officials or labor attorneys in evaluating or litigating pending unfair labor practice charges by the IBEW against Westinghouse for its anti-union campaign.”
Indeed, IBEW has charged Westinghouse with violating the National Labor Relations Act by allegedly soliciting grievances and making promises to fix them, granting benefits, banning union literature, threatening employees for discussing the union, threatening employees with loss of benefits and terminating an employee for union activity.
Some of this alleged illegal activity was allegedly undertaken by consultants. For example, one of the consultants retained by Westinghouse, Wildine Pierre Barrett (who excludes their last name in the LM-20 he filed), allegedly made coercive statements and threats to employees.
Private equity-backed companies like Westinghouse are known to hire union-busters at higher rates than other companies. But the sum paid by Westinghouse – which has been owned entirely or mostly by Brookfield Asset Management since 2018 – sets it apart from the pack. The $836,186 reported by those two consultancies is greater than the total spending by all private equity-backed companies in 2023 that had been reported by the same time last year. And, again, that number could understate Westinghouse’s total spending on union-busters (and definitely understates the full cost it chose to incur by fighting IBEW). We have no way to know since Westinghouse has failed to file its required LM-10.
The other cluster of violations that LaborLab reported to OLMS concern the failure of many of the consultants hired by Westinghouse to file their annual LM-21 forms reporting all the reportable persuader activity they engaged in during 2024. These reports provide a more complete picture of the activities any given consultancy undertakes while exposing union-busting expenditures of employers that such employers otherwise might illegally wish to conceal by not filing an LM-10.
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