Region 2 of the National Labor Relations Board (“NLRB”) has filed a motion with the Federal District Court for the Southern District of New York, seeking a civil contempt finding and monetary damages from Covenant House New York (“Covenant House”) for violating a 2025 injunction.

 

This is the latest development in Covenant House’s flagrant union busting since its employees organized a union with 1199SEIU over four years ago. In August, the NLRB revealed it intended to seek contempt damages in the case.

 

The NLRB now wants Covenant House and their attorney, Don T. Carmody, to pay 1199SEIU’s legal fees and expenses incurred for negotiations and reimburse Covent House employees if they lost wages due to negotiations. The motion also seeks reimbursement from Covenant House and Carmody for the expenses, including attorneys’ fees, incurred by the NLRB in investigating the contempt allegations and enforcing the injunction.

 

The motion comes after a final decision by the NLRB on August 5 adopting an administrative law judge’s findings that Covenant House broke the law by refusing to make proposals, meet for bargaining, and provide information to the union–and by threatening members of the union’s negotiating committee with discipline for federally protected union activity.

 

The motion alleges that Covenant House and Carmody employed “tactics designed to frustrate bargaining,” and that Carmody “manufactured obstacles to meaningful negotiation based on specious claims.”

 

Among the numerous delay tactics employed by Covenant House under Carmody’s guidance were “actions to run out the clock” during court-ordered negotiating sessions by starting late or ending early, insisting on using bargaining time to discuss unrelated issues, leaving the union in a Zoom waiting room for 90 minutes after the scheduled start-time of a session, and changing meeting locations with little–and once even no notice–to the union.

 

The labor board’s motion also alleges that Covenant House refused to bargain at all unless the union’s legal team turned over their notes, agreed to use only pen and paper for notetaking, and waive their right to type notes at future negotiating sessions. This behavior was “designed to frustrate reaching an agreement, and bargain solely on the surface, thus clearly and convincingly engaging in bad-faith bargaining and contempt of the Court’s Injunction Order to bargain in good faith.”

 

Covenant House is also alleged to have violated the injunction by failing to provide adequate monthly bargaining reports to the NLRB based on false claims of confidentiality, and by refusing to provide the union with basic information required for contract negotiations, including wage data that New York State law requires employers to maintain.

 

Also outlined in the motion is Carmody’s record of using similar tactics in other cases. Carmody is the third attorney to represent Covenant House vis-à-vis the union in only four years, serving as Covenant House’s “chief negotiator” for union contract bargaining since early 2024. 

 

The NLRB described Carmody as playing “an outsized factor” in Covenant House’s “flagrant refusals to bargain with the Union,” and wrote that “Carmody’s conduct in this case and others evinced a clear pattern of recidivism,” and his “personal history shows that he has abused judicial and administrative systems in the past, and, like here, caused parties to incur costs and attorneys’ fees.”

 

Covenant House and Carmody have until September 11 to respond to the NLRB’s factual allegations and arguments.