🗞️ Scare Tactics and Massage Chairs: How an LA Metro Contractor Botched Its Union Fight

When Amalgamated Transit Union Local 1756 filed a petition to represent transit ambassadors employed by Strive Well-Being, Inc. in the spring of 2023, the San Diego wellness company found itself navigating unfamiliar terrain. Within weeks, its principals were holding all-hands meetings, floating promises of massage chairs, and warning workers that a union vote could cost them their jobs. A federal labor judge has now ruled that the company went too far.

In a decision issued April 22, 2026, Administrative Law Judge Brian D. Gee found that Strive committed multiple violations of federal labor law during the run-up to a June 2023 union election, conduct serious enough to void the result and order a new vote. The union had lost decisively, 65 to 30, with 113 workers eligible to cast ballots.

Strive had built its Los Angeles workforce rapidly after winning a 2022 contract with the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority to staff what Metro called its Transit Ambassador Pilot Program. The ambassadors, easily identified by their neon green LA Metro shirts, helped riders buy tickets, navigate the sprawling transit network, and respond to emergencies on platforms and trains. Metro required the program's workforce to reflect the diversity of its ridership, and Strive focused its recruiting accordingly, partnering with Homeboy Industries to hire formerly incarcerated workers, with CALIF to attract candidates with disabilities, and with Union Station Homeless Services to reach people who had experienced homelessness.

Management did not learn of the organizing campaign until the afternoon of April 25, 2023, when the NLRB's Los Angeles regional office served Strive with the union's representation petition. That same day, by a matter of hours, the company had already distributed a new attendance policy it had spent months drafting in response to chronic absenteeism. The judge found that timing dispositive and rejected claims that the policy was promulgated as a retaliatory measure against union activity.

What followed over the next six weeks is where the judge found the company's conduct crossed legal lines. At a May 15 meeting in the Union Station fitness room, company founder Amit Sangani and his father Sanjay, who served as director of operations, warned the assembled ambassadors that a union victory could prompt Metro to cancel the pilot program altogether, leaving every worker without a job. The judge found the prediction had no factual foundation. Sanjay himself acknowledged on cross-examination that Metro had given no indication it was considering cancellation. The same warning was repeated in emails sent just three days before the election began, with language the judge described as sending a "chilling message" to workers. Under the standard the Supreme Court established in NLRB v. Gissel Packing Co. (1969), employer predictions about the consequences of unionization must be grounded in objective fact rather than conjecture about events beyond the employer's control.

At a May 8 meeting, Amit told workers he was looking into providing massage chairs so they could decompress during shifts. In the weeks that followed, according to testimony the judge credited, management canvassed ambassadors about what perks they wanted and began floating the prospect of food trucks stationed at their deployment sites. The judge found those offers were made without any prior history of such benefits and in direct response to the organizing drive, a violation of the rule against promising new benefits during a union campaign. At the May 15 meeting, Amit and Sanjay asked the room to raise hands indicating who supported the union and who supported the company, a public show of sentiment the judge found constituted unlawful interrogation and polling of employees.

The judge dismissed the bulk of the complaint, however. Warnings that unionization would reduce workers' direct access to management were found to be protected campaign speech under then-controlling precedent, even though the NLRB's Board later overruled that standard in Siren Retail Corp. (2024), doing so only on a going-forward basis. Reminders about a contractually mandated 5 percent wage increase, contained in several company emails, were found lawful because the raise predated the union campaign and was not conditioned on voting against the union. Allegations that the company threatened discipline, unlawfully disparaged the lead organizer, or retaliated through its attendance policy were similarly rejected.

The case turned significantly on credibility. The General Counsel's lead witness, former ambassador and union organizer Fabian Bolanos, was largely discredited. The judge found his testimony exaggerated and at times false, noting that Bolanos insisted a garbled, nearly incomprehensible auto-transcription of a staff meeting was accurate. His behavior during the hearing compounded the problem: after being instructed twice to stop reading a document, he continued to do so, drawing an on-the-record admonishment from the judge. The violations that were ultimately sustained rested primarily on the testimony of a second witness, fellow ambassador Adam Brooks, whose account the judge found detailed, consistent, and credible under cross-examination.

The ruling arrives with an asterisk. By August 31, 2025, Metro had already moved the Transit Ambassador Program in-house, ending Strive's involvement entirely. Whether a remedial election will have practical consequences for the workers who remain in the program, now employed directly by the transit agency, is a question the decision leaves unresolved.

Key Points

• A federal administrative law judge voided a June 2023 union election at Strive Well-Being, an LA Metro contractor, after finding the company committed unfair labor practices in the weeks before the vote.
• Violations sustained: threatening workers with job loss by warning Metro could cancel the pilot program, promising new wellness perks such as massage chairs and food trucks to discourage union support, and forcing employees to publicly reveal their union preferences through a show of hands.
• Violations dismissed: warnings about reduced management access under the then-applicable Tri-Cast standard, reminders about a pre-existing contractual wage increase, email criticism of the lead union organizer, and the rollout of an attendance policy developed months before the petition was filed.
• The General Counsel's primary witness, Fabian Bolanos, was largely discredited by the judge; the sustained violations rested chiefly on the testimony of ambassador Adam Brooks.
• The original election ended 65 to 30 against the union, with 113 eligible voters; that result has been set aside and a new election ordered.
• Metro brought the Transit Ambassador Program in-house by August 2025, effectively ending Strive's operation of it before the legal proceedings concluded.

Primary Source Author: Brian D. Gee, Administrative Law Judge, NLRB Division of Judges, San Francisco Branch Office

Primary Source: Strive Well-Being, Inc., JD(SF)-07-26 (April 22, 2026)

Primary Source Link: https://www.nlrb.gov/case/21-CA-318148

Supplemental Links

• NLRB Case Docket, 21-RC-316782 (Representation Election)
• LA Metro Transit Ambassadors Seek to Unionize, Audacy/KNX News (June 2023)
• Metro Ambassadors Vote Down Union, Transit Talent (June 2023)
• Metro Board Votes to Make Transit Ambassador Program Permanent, Westside Current (October 2023)
• NLRB v. Gissel Packing Co., 395 U.S. 575 (1969), Justia Supreme Court
• NLRB Returns to Gissel Standard After Siren Retail (2024), Baker Sterchi
• Strive Well-Being Ambassador Programs, Strive Corporate Site