Union busting at Leonard Green’s Pye-Barker

Pye-Barker
Employees at Pye-Barker Fire and Safety are sounding the alarm about union-busting across several locations. Since at least 2023, Pye-Barker has paid anti-union consultants more than $300,000^[1] to discourage workers from forming a union. Private equity firm Leonard Green and Partners holds a majority stake in the company.

Pye-Barker has primarily contracted with LRI Consulting Services, one of the largest union-busting firms in the country. LRI has used a subcontractor model, acting as a middle man that connects companies to consultants and takes a percentage of the payment.

Pye-Barker reported spending $222,745 on LRI alone in 2025, fighting union drives in Carlstadt, NJ; Cranford, NJ; Richmond, VA; and Miamisburgh, OH. While this only covers the consultants that speak to workers to dissuade them from unionization, additional attorneys’ fees could significantly increase this amount, considering the anti-union law firm that Pye Barker has hired, Littler Mendelson, can charge up to $1,760 per hour.

In its 2024 anti-union campaign, Pye-Barker paid $67,168 to The Crossroads Group to convince seven employees at a Bowling Green, KY location not to unionize. In 2025, it spent $80,164 to LRI Consulting to counter employees organizing a union at an eight person unit in Cranford, NJ and another $96,834 to stop ten workers from voting for a union in Carlstadt, NJ. Pye-Barker also hired LRI to wage two other anti-union campaigns in 2025 in Richmond, VA and Miamisburg, OH.

Workers in Schertz, TX and Carlstadt, NJ, filed for elections to gain union representation in 2026. Since then, Pye Barker has hired LRI and another consultant to dissuade workers in Texas and New Jersey from voting in favor of the union, signing open ended contracts to pay these persuaders $425 per hour, plus travel expenses. Pye Barker will likely spend significant resources to stop workers from winning representation when they votethissummer.

Pye Barker employees have filed several unfair labor practices (ULPs) with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) in these locations, alleging coercion, interrogation, retaliation/discipline, and refusal to recognize a union’s demand to bargain. Pye Barker entered into conformed settlement agreements in twocases.

The publicly available expenses that Pye Barker has undertaken to stop its employees from unionizing understate the true costs of these campaigns, as the federal LM forms do not require companies to report on costs not associated with persuaders. They do not include costs such as attorneys’ fees, employee time lost to anti-union meetings, or legal expenses related to unfair labor practices filed in connection to these campaigns.

Leonard Green & Partners
Private equity firm Leonard Green had $75 billion in assets under management as of December 2024, making last year’s list of Private Equity International’s top 20 largest private equity firms in the world.

According to the American Investment Council, private equity firms employed 13.3 million people in 2024, making up 10% of the private sector workforce that year, up from 9% in 2022.^[2] Private equity-backed companies accounted for 15% of all labor consultant contracts recorded in 2023, outpacing their market workforce share.

When Leonard Green acquired Pye-Barker in 2019, the company had less than 60 locations. As of July 2026, Pye-Barker has 259 locations across 47 states and employs more than 9,000 people. The company has grown tremendously by acquiring 166 smaller companies, with 57 acquisitions in 2025 alone.

Leonard Green has a pattern of rapid growth through acquisition in its portfolio. In December 2021, the firm acquired The Stepping Stones Group (Stepping Stones), which provides behavioral health services to children in school, home, and center-based settings in almost every US state. Since then, Stepping Stones has acquired 20 smaller companies in the special education and behavioral health sector, including Invo Healthcare in January 2026. A PESP analysis of district spending in Richmond, California found that the school district could have saved more than $600,000^[3] by bringing positions outsourced to Stepping Stones back in house.

In 2024, Stepping Stones Group agreed to pay $4.25 million to settle a class action lawsuit alleging widespread wage and hour violations, including failure to pay all minimum wages, failure to provide meal periods or pay for missed meals, failure to provide rest periods, untimely payment of wages, and other claims. While agreeing to settle, Stepping Stones Group denied all claims and maintains that it has fully complied with the law.

Beyond Stepping Stones, Leonard Green has gained notoriety as a firm that harms patients, workers, and consumers. From 2010-2020, Leonard Green took approximately $437 million in fees and dividends from Prospect Medical Holdings by saddling it with debt and then pocketing the proceeds of loans. The Senate Budget Committee found that Leonard Green “spent board meetings discussing profit maximization tactics—cost cutting, increasing patient volume, and managing labor expenses—with little to no discussion of patient outcomes or quality of care at their hospitals.”

Prospect filed for bankruptcy in January 2025 with over $1 billion in liabilities. Leonard Green sold its stake in the company in 2021, but left Prospect with more than $100 million in yearly rent payments and $3 billion in liabilities. Leonard Green and Partners also owned Joann when the company filed for bankruptcy earlier this year. Joann laid off 19,000 people and closed 500 stores.

Private equity firms should not spend investors’ resources on expensive and problematic anti-union consultants or other forms of union busting. As workers at many Pye-Barker locations around the country continue to join unions, the company and its private equity owner should implement policies that guarantee non-interference and neutrality and invest in worker pay, benefits, health and safety, and professional development.

^[1] Sum of OLMS reports: 2023, 2024, 2025

^[2] Bureau of Labor Statistics data estimated 136.2 million people worked in the private sector in 2024: https://www.bls.gov/cew/publications/employment-and-wages-annual-averages/current/; previous year cited here: https://pestakeholder.org/news/private-equity-backed-companies-union-busting-at-higher-rate-than-peers/

^[3] For legal review only: see spreadsheet.