A three-day ‘positive employee relations’ conference is coming to Tampa this weekend, hosted by an organization that goes by the seemingly-innocuous acronym “CUE.”
But the gathering is drawing criticism from local labor leaders who are calling it a “gathering of union busters.”
The focus of the semiannual conference is publicly touted as “strengthening positive employee relations.” But as The Intercept reported in 2022, the conference, in practice, serves as a three-day brainstorming and strategy session for anti-union employers and the multi-million dollar union avoidance industry.
While large, multibillion-dollar companies like Amazon and Starbucks have run scorched-earth campaigns in recent years to counter union drives—utilizing high-cost labor attorneys and third-party consultants—the vast majority of nonunion U.S. employers report feeling unprepared to respond to union organizing activity.
Stephanie Yocum, a Polk County high school teacher and president of the West Central Florida Labor Council, told Creative Loafing Tampa Bay in a statement that while CUE—formerly known as the Council on Union-Free Environment—claims to be a “community for positive employee relations,” an observer “only needs to look at the agenda and keynote speakers to see that this event is a gathering of union busters, a $400 million industry of parasites who earn a living making the lives of working families more difficult.”
Indeed, the group’s semiannual “employee relations” conference, running from April 19-21 at the Hilton Tampa Downtown, is expected to bring together scores of company representatives and union avoidance consultants—dubbed “union busters” by critics—to discuss topics such as the “u” word, how to “lawfully” and “effectively” talk to workers about unions, and how to handle worker strikes, according to a public agenda posted online.
Participants will even get the chance to walk through a “highly realistic” simulation of a union organizing drive, led by a representative of LuLuLemon. “What happens when early employee concerns escalate into visible protest actions, walkouts, legal challenges, and a union election?” a description of the workshop reads. “In this hands-on simulation, participants will step into the role of organizational leaders responding to a fictional—but highly realistic—organizing campaign.”
CUE Inc., a nonprofit and membership-based organization, doesn’t publicly affiliate itself with the former “Council for a Union-Free Environment,” an organization founded in 1977 by the National Association of Manufacturers, a business advocacy group. According to union buster watchdog Bob Funk, that’s a calculated decision made by the industry as a sort of rebranding exercise.
“CUE is an organization that dares not speak its own name,” Funk, founder and executive director of the pro-union nonprofit LaborLab, told CL. “Its mission is to organize and arm employers to wage class war from above through ruthless, relentless union-busting. But it has to camouflage that mission because the vast majority of Americans support unions and workers’ rights.”
Countering the union ‘threat’
A Gallup survey published last August found that 68% of U.S. adults support labor unions—a near-record high—even though the rate of union membership in the U.S. is at a near-record low of 10%.
This decline may be in part attributed to a calculated investment by U.S. employers—coupled with decades of anti-union policy shifts—who collectively spend upwards of $400 million annually on union avoidance consultants and employer-friendly labor law firms like Littler Mendelson and Jackson Lewis to counter the “threat” of unionization. Many of these high-priced attorneys and consultants are expected to be at the CUE conference this next week.
One of the conference’s keynote speakers, for instance, is Phil Wilson, a longtime labor consultant, CUE advisory committee member, and president of the Labor Relations Institute, also known as LRI Consulting. Described as “corporate America’s favorite union busting firm,” LRI is one of the most active union avoidance firms in the country, charging upwards of $400-plus per hour to persuade workers against unionization.
In 2025 alone, Wilson’s firm raked in at least $5 million from companies such as Domino’s Pizza, Petsmart, and Ford Motors’ electrical battery venture BlueOval SK, according to a financial disclosure report filed with the U.S. Department of Labor. His firm has historically worked with the likes of companies such as Hershey, Williams-Sonoma, and Walgreens, while openly touting its talent for helping companies “prevent potential vulnerabilities” to unionization “before it’s too late.”
Yocum, the local labor council head, told CL that CUE and its attendees “are not welcome” in West Central Florida. As president of the Polk County teachers’ union, she’s well-versed in the state government’s efforts to undermine unions like hers through the passage of legislation in recent years targeting teachers unions at the behest of anti-union special interest groups.
“Union busters get paid up to thousands of dollars per day to break union organizing efforts and have been found countless times guilty of violating workers’ rights to achieve that end,” she added.
A high-priced gig
Although there is nothing in federal law that necessarily bars companies from hiring union busters, the federal National Labor Relations Act does contain certain guardrails that forbid employers—and any union busters they contract—from firing workers, threatening their jobs, or otherwise retaliating against them in response to their organizing activity. This doesn’t stop them from doing so anyway.
Yocum said it’s “further insult” that the CUE conference was also scheduled to host a social hour at the Columbia Restaurant in Ybor City next Monday evening, considering Ybor’s radical and militant history of union organizing among the city’s cigar workers.
The Tampa Bay region, for its part, is no stranger to these union avoidance firms and individual consultants that report Tampa-area addresses to the federal government. Under federal law, third-party consultants who are contracted by an employer to “persuade” workers against unionization are required to file reports with the U.S. labor department disclosing this information, although actual enforcement of these reporting requirements is spotty.
Niles Commer, a consultant based out of Sarasota, for instance, was fired from a ‘union avoidance’ gig at a Montana hospital system in 2023 after nurses discovered an internal document of “sensitive information” that he had compiled, on behalf of their employer, to counter their organizing drive with the Montana Nurses Association.
LaThesia Hardy, a consultant based out of St. Petersburg, was paid six figures in 2023 and another $224,410 in 2025 to “communicate” with Amazon employees as a subcontractor of the Massachusetts-based anti-union consultancy firm Lev Labor. Katie Lev, the president of Lev Labor, is also a CUE committee advisory member. Her firm was paid $4.4 million by Amazon in 2025 alone, according to federal disclosure filings.
“The people who attend CUE have complete contempt for the human right to free association and collective bargaining,” Funk argued. “It is a group of virulently anti-union employers and modern-day Pinkertons committed to preventing or destroying any effort by workers to exercise even a modest degree of independent collective control over their working lives.”
Convening in the ‘billionaire’s playground’
The conference—which previously visited Tampa in 2018—comes at a time when the U.S. rate of union membership is less than one-third of what it was in the 1940s, when roughly 33% of the U.S. workforce was unionized. Most Americans believe that unions’ decline has been bad for the country, as income inequality has only grown.
In Florida, less than 7% of the workforce has union representation and its associated benefits, such as stronger job benefits, reduced racial and gender wage gaps, contractual health and safety protections, and greater retirement security.
This past March, state lawmakers also passed a new bill (SB 1296), now awaiting Gov. Ron DeSantis’s signature, that would make it harder for most public sector employees, in particular, to either keep a union they currently have or form a new one.
Public records show that bill was backed and partially drafted by billionaire-funded think tanks like the Freedom Foundation, an out-of-state group with ties to the union avoidance industry that positions government unions as the “root cause of every growing national dysfunction.”
“Florida has become a billionaires’ playground,” Dr. Rich Templin, director of politics and policy for the Florida AFL-CIO, told Orlando Weekly just ahead of the bill’s passage. “If you’ve got billions of dollars and a think-tank and you just want to have some fun with public policy that impacts hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people in some cases, you come to Florida.”
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This article appears in Apr. 16 – 22, 2026.