BAC Organizers Expose Abusive Contractor – And Get Results

When Rosales Masonry (also known as 5G Masonry and Rock & Stone Masonry) started building a senior living center in suburban St. Louis, the Eastern Missouri ADC didn’t just watch the non-union contractor take BAC work. They fought back. And they didn’t do it alone.  

Along with IU Organizer Marvin Monge, the ADC started talking with some of Rosales’s bricklayers – and they quickly realized that Rosales wasn’t a small operation. The ADC learned that Rosales, based out of southwestern Missouri, was working on multifamily and senior living developments throughout the upper Midwest – from Minnesota down to Kansas. And they also learned that Rosales’s workforce was made up largely of foreign bricklayers and tenders in the United States on H-2B visas. So Eastern Missouri ADC Director Brian Jennewein reached out to IU North Central Director Jeremy Rivas, who brought together leaders from the ADC, Local 3 Iowa, Local 15 Missouri/Kansas/Nebraska, and Local 1 Minnesota/North Dakota/South Dakota to collaborate on a multifaceted, multi-state campaign to make Rosales play by the rules. 

“When we’re faced with a non-union contractor like Rosales, who works across multiple states, BAC affiliates need to collaborate to address the problem,” said Rivas. “And that’s where the IU – the North Central regional staff and the Organizing Department – came in. We worked with the four involved affiliates to research the contractor, develop a plan, and execute the plan. And we couldn’t have succeeded without the active participation of each affiliate.” 

The BAC team began their campaign by developing a comprehensive profile of Rosales. Through computer research, outreach to owners, contractors, and suppliers, and – most critically – talking with dozens of Rosales bricklayers on jobs throughout the region, the organizers were able to document countless ways that the company was undercutting area standards, violating safety rules, and mistreating and underpaying its immigrant employees. After attempts to engage directly with company ownership to address these issues went nowhere, the campaign moved into its next phase. 

“In order to get H-2B visas for immigrant workers, Rosales first needed to advertise for US bricklayers and show the government there weren’t any. So a number of us, the BAC organizers, applied for work – and Rosales had no choice but to hire us,” explained Monge. Ultimately, over a dozen IU and local organizers, including Monge, Jennewein, Local 3 Iowa President Ray Lemke, and representatives of each of the other affiliates in the campaign ended up “salting” Rosales – working for the contractor with their tools while attempting to organize the bricklayers. “After we’d been working for a week, we went on economic strike – but not before we filed for an NLRB election,” recounted Jennewein. “We knew we probably wouldn’t win the election, but we wanted to hit the company from multiple angles.” 

And that’s exactly what they did. At the same time that they were salting and campaigning for the election, the BAC team was exposing Rosales’s well-documented misdeeds to the Missouri Attorney General, Minnesota Attorney General, OSHA, and the US Department of Labor. “We took a shotgun approach,” remembered Local 1 Minnesota/North Dakota/South Dakota President Doug Schroeder. “We were telling anyone who’d listen, and who had power to do something about it, that Rosales was breaking the law and abusing the visa system and its bricklayers.” 

After nearly two years of sustained work, the work of the BAC organizers paid off. In spring 2025, Rosales and its related companies were prohibited from using the H-2B visa program for five years. “That was a massive blow to Rosales. Their business model was based on exploiting and underpaying H-2B visa bricklayers to undercut union contractors,” said Jennewein. “And at the same time, the Department of Labor required Rosales to pay over $1.5 million in underpaid wages and penalties to the bricklayers they cheated.” 

“Between the financial hit and being barred from the H-2B program, Rosales is far weaker than when we began our campaign,” says Rivas. “We crippled their ability to take work away from fair contractors and BAC members. And we were able to do it by working hard – and just as importantly, by working together as union brothers and sisters.”