Three plumbing workers in Baton Rouge, Louisiana lost their jobs for trying to form a union in 2009. Sixteen years later, they still haven’t been paid a dime.
The Setup: A Union Drive, Three Firings, and a Boss Who Hired a Homicide Detective
In late 2009, workers at AllService Plumbing and Maintenance in Baton Rouge, Louisiana were visited by a union organizer named Charles LeBlanc. LeBlanc was trying to organize AllService’s plumbers into the United Association of Journeymen and Apprentices of the Plumbing Industry, Local 198. Workers listened. Some signed authorization cards. The effort was peaceful, legal, and protected by federal law.
The company’s response was anything but peaceful. A supervisor named Joe Lungrin, described by ownership as the “eyes and ears” of the business, began monitoring union supporters. Court records show Lungrin attended a union organizing meeting at a Hooters restaurant and sat apart from the group, watching who showed up. He interrogated workers about their union membership. He also called management to report organizing activity in real time.
When LeBlanc visited the parking lot to distribute union leaflets, Lungrin screamed across the lot that AllService “was a nonunion shop and that it would always be a nonunion shop,” demanding LeBlanc “wipe his ass” with a leaflet. On the day of the union election, management hired a homicide detective to provide “security” and control voter entry. Inside, the voting booth sat directly in front of a bulletin board bearing the phrase “never abandon the owner or the company.”
The Firings No One Was Supposed to Notice
After AllService and the union agreed on an election date, the company laid off three plumbing workers: Brady Barbour, Doug Diamond, and Michael Grimes. The timing was not subtle. An NLRB administrative law judge later ruled the layoffs were directly tied to those workers’ union activity, violating federal labor law.
The union lost the election by a wide margin. Lungrin celebrated in front of the entire workforce. Shortly after, Lungrin relayed the words of Vice President Luke Hall to employees: whoever had taken photos of the company bulletin board for the union should watch out, because Hall would “have his balls.” Lungrin himself reportedly suggested Hall should shoot the person “between the eyes.”
The union filed an unfair labor practice complaint. An NLRB administrative law judge heard testimony and in 2011 ruled against AllService on nearly every count. The company was ordered to reinstate the three fired workers with full backpay and daily compounding interest. AllService filed zero objections to that ruling. The NLRB adopted it as final in January 2012.
A Timeline of Delays: How Eight Years of Government Negligence Buried Three Workers
The Non-Financial Ledger: What You Can’t Put in a Backpay Calculation
Brady Barbour, Doug Diamond, and Michael Grimes were plumbers. They showed up to work, they did their jobs, and when someone came to their worksite offering them the chance to organize for better conditions, they listened. That is it. That is the entire crime for which they were punished. Federal law guaranteed their right to do exactly what they did, and their employer took their livelihoods anyway.
The moment AllService laid those three men off, the clock started running on their financial ruin. Backpay with daily compounding interest accumulated for years. But the money number tells only the smallest part of the story. These workers lost their income at a time when no other legal protection caught them. They had to find new work, explain the gap in employment, rebuild. The NLRB ruling in their favor was a piece of paper that promised them justice without delivering it for over a decade.
Consider what the passage of time actually meant for these men. The original ruling in their favor came in 2011. The backpay order was finalized in 2013. It is now 2025. A worker who was 35 years old when he was illegally fired is now 51 years old. The prime earning years of these workers’ careers evaporated while lawyers argued over procedural technicalities, while a government agency forgot the case existed, while two catastrophic floods destroyed the records that might have helped calculate what was owed. The bureaucratic machinery that was supposed to protect them became the thing that ground them down.
The dissenting federal judge in this case said it plainly: the workers were the ones who suffered the consequences of the Board’s delay, not the company. The Supreme Court had said the same thing decades earlier in a case with nearly identical facts, ruling that wronged workers “are at least as much injured by the Board’s delay in collecting their back pay as is the wrongdoing employer.” That precedent was set aside here. The people who committed no violation, who broke no law, who simply wanted a union, absorbed the cost of everyone else’s failures. That is the real ledger. It does not appear anywhere in the court’s final order.
Legal Receipts: The Most Damning Lines From the Court Record
“Lungrin screamed across the parking lot that [AllService] was a nonunion shop and that it would always be a nonunion shop.” — NLRB Administrative Record, describing supervisor Joe Lungrin’s response to a union organizer distributing leaflets at the AllService facility
“The NLRB has zero explanation for its delay—the Board even admits its own ‘administrative neglect.’ As the Board’s lawyer put it at oral argument, ‘the cake was baked’ way back in 2013 when the second NLRB ALJ entered his order against AllService.” — Fifth Circuit majority opinion, May 23, 2025, explaining why it refused to enforce the decade-old backpay order
“It cannot then turn around and demand that AllService jump through an administrative hoop in 28 days upon pain of forfeiting whatever objections it wants to make against the Board’s decision, and upon pain of accepting a backpay order that has been accruing daily compound interest while the Board slept.” — Fifth Circuit majority opinion, May 23, 2025, describing the NLRB’s attempt to enforce its long-neglected order against AllService
“The majority spills much ink mourning the adverse impact to AllService should we enforce the Board’s delayed order but says nothing about the impact to the wronged employees. I don’t think that’s quite right… the Board is not required to place the consequences of its own delay, even if inordinate, upon wronged employees to the benefit of wrongdoing employers.” — Judge James L. Dennis, dissenting opinion, May 23, 2025, citing NLRB v. J.H. Rutter-Rex Mfg. Co., 396 U.S. 258 (1969)
“Lungrin also relayed the words of Mr. Hall to AllService employees, saying that should Mr. Hall identify the responsible individual, he would ‘have his balls.’ Lungrin suggested Mr. Hall shoot the culprit ‘between the eyes.'” — Dissenting opinion’s recitation of facts established at trial, describing the post-election threats made to employees suspected of cooperating with the union
“If men must turn square corners when they deal with the government, it cannot be too much to expect the government to turn square corners when it deals with them.” — Niz-Chavez v. Garland, 593 U.S. 155, 172 (2021), cited by the Fifth Circuit majority as the equity principle that barred the NLRB from enforcing its stale order
What Daily Compound Interest Does to a $100,000 Debt Over a Decade
Societal Impact: What This Case Does to Every Worker in America
Economic Inequality: The Price of Organizing Just Got Higher
The math here is simple and brutal. A company can fire union supporters, refuse to pay the legally mandated backpay for over a decade, and walk away clean if the government agency responsible for enforcement forgets to do its job. The workers receive nothing. The company retains the money it owed. The deterrent against union-busting effectively disappears.
The court record confirms the NLRB admitted its own “administrative neglect.” The Board’s lawyer stood in federal court and acknowledged the agency just forgot. In the meantime, the three workers who were illegally fired in 2009 saw the entire enforcement machinery collapse around them: a Supreme Court ruling voided the quorum that issued the backpay order, eight years of silence followed, two floods destroyed records, and the company pleaded poverty. Every single one of those developments worked in the employer’s favor. None of them helped the workers.
The dissenting judge pointed out directly that the majority opinion “firmly placing the consequences of the Board’s delay upon wronged employees to the benefit of a wrongdoing employer” with no genuine attempt to balance the equities. That is the economic reality of this ruling: when enforcement systems fail, the people who can least afford to absorb the loss are the ones who absorb it. AllService’s owners, Luke and Janice Hall, kept their business. The workers kept their zero-dollar payout.
This precedent now exists in the Fifth Circuit. Any employer in Louisiana, Texas, or Mississippi who fires union supporters can now look at this ruling and understand that if the NLRB loses track of the case for long enough, a federal appeals court may consider the order too stale to enforce. That is the economic damage that extends far beyond three workers in Baton Rouge. It is an instruction manual for union-busting through delay.
Public Health: The Specific Violence of Workplace Fear
The court record documents a supervisor who attended a workers’ union meeting in secret to watch who showed up, then interrogated workers afterward about who was there. It documents threats relayed by that supervisor that the company would close before going union. It documents election-day security provided by a homicide detective. It documents a phrase posted directly in front of the voting booth: “never abandon the owner or the company.”
Labor researchers and occupational health experts consistently find that workplace intimidation during organizing drives produces measurable psychological harm. Workers who fear losing their jobs for exercising a protected right face elevated anxiety, suppressed speech, and damaged trust in legal institutions. The surveillance apparatus described in this case, a supervisor deployed to watch a restaurant meeting, a detective deployed to control entry to a workplace election, a bulletin board positioned to stare down every person as they voted, produces exactly that kind of ambient fear.
Workers who experience illegal retaliation after organizing, as Barbour, Diamond, and Grimes did, face compounded harm: the financial loss of sudden unemployment, the stigma of termination, and the specific injury of knowing their government acknowledged the violation and then failed to remedy it for over a decade. The backpay order was supposed to make them whole. It never did.
The Cost of a Life
What Now: Who Owns This Mess and What You Can Do
The People Still Running This Company
According to the court record, AllService Plumbing and Maintenance, Inc. is owned and operated by Luke Hall (Vice President and General Manager) and Janice Hall (President and Operations Officer). The company remains in operation in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
The Regulatory Bodies That Own This Failure
- National Labor Relations Board (NLRB): The agency that admitted “administrative oversight” and abandoned three workers for eight years. Demand answers from your regional NLRB office about how cases fall through the cracks.
- U.S. Department of Labor (DOL): Oversees worker rights broadly. Contact them if you believe labor law violations in your workplace go unenforced.
- Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals: The court whose ruling now stands as precedent that a stale NLRB order may be too old to enforce, regardless of whether the workers were ever made whole.
- Congress: No law currently sets a time limit on NLRB enforcement actions, meaning the NLRB can wait indefinitely before collecting on a worker’s behalf. Push your representatives for legislation that imposes enforcement deadlines and protects workers from agency negligence.
Explore by category
Product Safety Violations
When companies sell dangerous goods, consumers pay the price.
View Cases →Financial Fraud & Corruption
Lies, scams, and executive impunity that distort markets.
View Cases →Related posts:
The Wage Theft of PTI’s Drivers | Professional Transportation Inc.
Industrial Demolition’s supervisor told an injured worker: “I don’t give a Fuck about your doctor’s note… We need production.” before firing him.
Spectrum Security did some wage theft against its own employees.
An employee suffered a seizure, requested an accommodation, and was fired just weeks later.
