What No Settlement Can Give Back

These were not abstract workers in a court filing. They were valet attendants who had been parking cars at Stony Brook Hospital since 2015. Some of them had been there from the very beginning, when their coworkers voted to form a union and join Local 1102 Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union. They had negotiated a contract. They had wages and benefits that reflected years of organized effort. They showed up every day to one of the more humbling jobs a person can hold: taking care of strangers’ cars while those strangers dealt with sick family members, emergencies, and fear.

Then a new company won the contract. That company’s managers visited the lot, spoke to the workers, and handed them cards with QR codes to fill out job applications. The workers did exactly what they were asked. They scanned the codes, filled out the forms, and waited. None of them ever heard back.

What they did not know at the time was that a manager at Parking Systems had already written them off in an internal email, calling them “35 lost soul attendants chatting with no info.” Another manager warned colleagues to “be careful of our messaging because they can’t have walk outs in the last 10 days or so.” The company was managing these workers like a public relations problem to be contained, not human beings with bills and families and rights.

Francis Gil Reyes had been at Stony Brook since 2015. The company wanted her specifically. They called her a “standout employee.” They offered her a job at a private interview. When she asked why her coworkers were not being considered, the part-owner told her point blank: because they worked with the union, and the company did not work with the union. Reyes turned the job down. She later explained that she “didn’t feel comfortable that he just want to hire me and not the other co-workers, because we all belong to a union, and we’ve been working together for a long time.” She gave up a job offer on principle. The court record reflects what happened next: nothing good.

The workers who lost their jobs did not just lose a paycheck. They lost faith in the structure that was supposed to protect them. The union’s business agent wrote in court filings that the workers “expressed how upset they were that they were out of work only because they had a union,” and that they felt “the Union is powerless to do anything for them.” Reyes herself testified that her coworkers said “unions don’t do nothing.” That damage, the grinding cynicism that comes from watching your collective power crushed in real time, does not appear in a back-pay calculation. It is the exact thing a union-busting strategy is designed to produce. Break the faith. Make the workers believe organizing was pointless. Fill the lot with new workers who never joined anything.

By the time the federal appeals court ruled in December 2025, more than two years had passed since December 1, 2023, the day Parking Systems took over and locked those 34 workers out. Most of them had already found new jobs. The union agent believed they would return to Stony Brook if offered reinstatement, and the fact that eleven had already accepted re-hire offers when they became available supports that belief. But two years of lost wages, lost continuity, lost seniority, and shattered trust in the one institution designed to stand between them and an employer like this cannot be returned by a court order.

The district court judge who denied the injunction in November 2024 did so in four sentences. Four sentences to dismiss the collective bargaining rights of 34 workers. The Second Circuit called the order a procedural violation and reversed it. But in those four sentences, and in the 11 months it took to get to an appeals court reversal, Parking Systems got exactly what it was buying: time to build an entrenched non-union workforce at Stony Brook while the legal process moved at what courts themselves have described as a “notoriously glacial” pace.

The Quotes That Prove It

These are verbatim statements from court filings, internal emails, and sworn testimony. They were entered into evidence and ruled upon by a federal Administrative Law Judge and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.

“They are 35 lost soul attendants chatting with no info.” Internal email from a Parking Systems manager, regarding the 34 unionized Classic Valet workers, October/November 2023 — Joint App’x at 113

• This email was written while Parking Systems was still handing workers QR codes for job applications, meaning management was actively stringing workers along while already writing them off internally.
• The phrase “chatting with no info” is an admission that the company was deliberately withholding information from workers about their employment status.
• Calling 34 people trying to keep their jobs “lost souls” reflects the contempt management held for the workers they were legally obligated to consider hiring without discriminating based on union membership.

“The staff currently working . . . will be out of work in December. We have to be careful of our messaging because they can’t have walk outs in the last 10 days or so.” Internal email from a Parking Systems manager, November 2023 — Joint App’x at 113

• This is a documented strategy to prevent workers from exercising their right to withhold labor by managing the information they received. The company’s primary concern was operational continuity, not compliance with labor law.
• The phrase “can’t have walk outs” is an admission that the company understood workers would organize a work stoppage if they knew the truth. The strategy was to keep them in the dark until it was too late to act.
• This email, combined with the QR code recruitment campaign, shows a calculated two-track operation: publicly simulate a fair hiring process while privately ensuring no union workers would ever be called back.

“[The employees] worked with the Union and . . . [t]he company didn’t work with the Union.” Statement attributed to Parking Systems part-owner Bobby Gust, made to Francis Gil Reyes during her job interview on November 25, 2023, as testified by Reyes before ALJ Benjamin Green — Joint App’x at 35

• This is the core statement that the ALJ found credible over Gust’s denial. Credibility findings by an ALJ who observed testimony firsthand carry significant legal weight in appellate review.
• The Second Circuit specifically cited this statement as evidence of “anti-union animus,” the legal threshold required to prove a discriminatory refusal to hire under Section 8(a)(3) of the National Labor Relations Act.
• The statement was a condition of employment: the workers could have jobs if they abandoned the union. That is a direct violation of federal labor law regardless of how politely it was phrased.

“I didn’t feel comfortable that he just want to hire me and not the other co-workers, because . . . we all belong to a union, and . . . we’ve been working together for a long time.” Francis Gil Reyes, testifying before ALJ Benjamin Green about why she declined Parking Systems’ job offer — Joint App’x at 34

• Reyes’s testimony is a documented act of solidarity. She was a “standout employee” being offered a job, and she turned it down because accepting would mean abandoning 33 coworkers to unemployment.
• Her decision also eliminated what would have been Parking Systems’ most credible counter-argument: that they were willing to hire the best workers regardless of union status. By making it a singular offer, the company revealed the selective nature of its discrimination.

“Having failed to articulate any cognizable irreparable harm — the sine qua non of preliminary relief — plaintiff has failed to meet the demanding standard for the issuance of a preliminary injunction.” U.S. District Court Judge (Brown, J.), four-sentence text order denying NLRB’s injunction petition, November 14, 2024 — Joint App’x at 25

• The Second Circuit found this order violated Rule 52(a)(2) of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, which requires courts to state findings and conclusions that support their decision. A one-line assertion with no analysis is not a finding of law; it is a conclusion with no reasoning.
• The appeals court ruled the district court was simply wrong on the merits: the NLRB had clearly articulated irreparable harm through impairment of collective bargaining rights and destruction of the unionization process, both of which are recognized categories of irreparable harm in Second Circuit precedent.
• The district court also cited the NLRB’s filing as being “eight months” after the unfair labor practices, but the Second Circuit found this calculation was wrong: the operative delay was five and a half months from when the complaint was issued and the NLRB was legally authorized to seek relief, a length the appeals court described as routine in this type of litigation.

“Parking Systems will have even longer to hire a complete, non-unionized workforce ‘[b]y its own violation of the Act’ in the absence of interim injunctive relief.” U.S. Court of Appeals, Second Circuit, December 19, 2025, quoting Inn Credible Caterers, 247 F.3d at 369 — Case No. 24-3324-cv

• This passage from the appeals court ruling also notes that the NLRB currently lacks the quorum required to issue final enforceable orders, because President Trump fired a Board member and a Supreme Court emergency application blocked the order reinstating her. This means the administrative enforcement pipeline is broken at the top, making the court-ordered injunction the only real mechanism for relief.
• The Second Circuit explicitly called out this institutional vacuum as a reason why the irreparable harm claim was, if anything, more compelling than usual, not less.

How This Ripples Outward

Public Health

Stony Brook Hospital is a public medical center. The people working its valet lanes are part of the healthcare ecosystem, handling vehicles for patients arriving in emergencies, visitors supporting loved ones, and staff keeping the hospital running. Disrupting a stable, experienced workforce at a hospital entrance is a patient safety and operational continuity issue.

• The 34 workers displaced by Parking Systems had institutional knowledge of the Stony Brook lots, patient flow patterns, and hospital-specific protocols. That knowledge was eliminated overnight when the company refused to retain any of them, replacing experienced workers with an entirely new, untrained workforce.
• Workers losing employer-provided health benefits upon sudden, discriminatory termination face immediate coverage gaps. People who have been doing the same physically demanding outdoor job for years, some since 2015, now faced a period without stable healthcare access.
• The psychological harm documented in the record, including workers expressing that they “lost faith” in unions and the formal system designed to protect them, is consistent with the documented mental health effects of sudden job loss under conditions of perceived injustice. These effects compound when legal remedies take two or more years to materialize.

Economic Inequality

This case is a textbook study in how contract handoffs are used to strip workers of wages and benefits they bargained for over years, while the company that wins the new contract profits by not honoring the obligations the previous employer accepted.

• Parking Systems submitted its winning bid for the Stony Brook contract without calculating union wage rates, meaning the bid was constructed on the assumption that the company would avoid the costs of the existing CBA. The court record shows a manager found the bid “close to the bone” the day after the union made contact, suggesting the financial model depended on replacing union workers with lower-paid non-union labor.
• Classic’s employees had a collective bargaining agreement in force through October 31, 2025. That contract represented years of negotiated wages, benefits, and working conditions. Parking Systems’ refusal to honor it when it assumed operations wiped out those terms for all 34 workers immediately, without negotiation or transition.
• The eleven workers Parking Systems did eventually re-hire during the litigation were taken back with no indication, per the court record, that they received the salary and benefits they had under their Classic CBA. Workers who returned accepted terms potentially worse than what their union contract guaranteed.
• The remaining workers who had already found new jobs by the time the Second Circuit ruled faced a labor market where their years of institutional experience at Stony Brook had no portable monetary value, because their specific bargaining unit had been dismantled. Seniority, accrued benefits, and union-protected wages cannot be transferred to a new employer.
• The case sets a repeatable template for large multi-location parking and service companies: bid low on public hospital contracts by excluding union costs, win the contract, refuse to hire the unionized predecessor workforce, survive the resulting NLRB process long enough to establish a non-union status quo, and then argue equity against reinstatement because a new workforce is already in place. The Second Circuit explicitly rejected this argument, but the financial reward during the years of litigation remains real.
• The NLRB’s current lack of a quorum to issue final, enforceable orders, caused by the Trump administration’s firing of a Board member, means this structural vulnerability is available to any employer willing to replicate Parking Systems’ playbook during the current political moment. The cost of doing so drops significantly when the enforcement pipeline at the top is disabled.

Putting a Number to It

Who to Watch and What to Do

The Second Circuit’s ruling is a legal win, but the injunction is only the beginning of enforcement. Parking Systems has filed exceptions to the ALJ decision, which are pending before an NLRB Board that currently lacks a quorum to act. Here is who to hold accountable and what you can do.

Key Decision-Makers at Parking Systems Plus

• Bobby Gust, Part-Owner: The individual whose statement “the company didn’t work with the Union” was found credible by the ALJ and forms a central pillar of the case against the company.
• [Additional ownership and senior management]: Named individuals beyond Gust are not identified in the court record beyond their functional roles. The company operates over 250 locations across Long Island and the greater Tri-State area.

Watchlist: Regulatory and Legal Bodies

• National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), Region 29: Filed the original charges and the injunction petition. Currently lacks a quorum for final Board action due to Trump administration personnel actions. Monitor the Board’s membership status at nlrb.gov.
• U.S. Court of Appeals, Second Circuit: Issued the December 19, 2025 reversal ordering entry of the injunction. The case (Docket No. 24-3324-cv) is now on remand to the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York.
• U.S. District Court, Eastern District of New York (Judge Brown): The court that issued the four-sentence denial and now must enter the injunction on remand. Court records are public at pacer.gov.
• ALJ Benjamin Green’s Decision (January 24, 2025): The underlying unfair labor practice ruling finding violations of §8(a)(3) and §8(a)(5) is on appeal to the full NLRB Board. Track this case using NLRB case number cross-referenced to the complaint issued April 23, 2024.
• Department of Labor (DOL): Relevant to wage enforcement if re-hired workers are not receiving pay and benefits consistent with the Classic CBA terms, as the court record suggests may be the case.

What You Can Do

• Contact Local 1102 RWDSU/UFCW directly to ask how to support the workers at Stony Brook Hospital during the reinstatement process. Unions in active enforcement phases need community visibility and pressure.
• If you use or work at Stony Brook Hospital, ask management publicly whether the hospital’s vendor contract with Parking Systems Plus contains labor compliance standards, and whether those standards are being enforced now that a federal court has found the company violated labor law.
• Raise awareness about the NLRB’s current quorum crisis. The board that is supposed to enforce this ruling cannot currently issue final orders due to a politically motivated firing. Contact your U.S. Senators and the Senate HELP Committee to demand the confirmation of NLRB Board members.
• Support grassroots labor organizations in the Tri-State area that document and publicize successor employer union-stripping during contract transitions. This is a systemic pattern in parking, food service, janitorial, and hospital support sectors.
• Research all parking contracts at public institutions in your area. Parking management is a low-scrutiny sector where the playbook used at Stony Brook is routinely replicated. Transparency requests under state FOIA laws can surface vendor contracts and whether they include labor standards clauses.