Jeff Bennett is a Senior Labor Relations Consultant with FH Solutions Group.
Jeff has 25 years of human resources and labor relations experience in various industries, with a focus on collective bargaining under the Railway Labor Act (RLA) and the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA). Jeff serves as lead negotiator for FH Solutions Group’s commercial real estate and property management clients.
Most recently, Jeff was a Human Resources Generalist with International Paper, a Fortune 500 global manufacturing company. He guided all aspects of negotiation strategy, workplace investigations, and maintaining positive union-management relationships. He also educated and coached managers on company policies and federal and state regulations to ensure consistent delivery of human resources services.
Prior to International Paper, Jeff was a Corporate Labor Relations Officer for Amtrak, where he administered national collective bargaining agreements with nine mechanical, onboard service, and supervisors' unions representing more than 6,600 employees. Jeff successfully defended discipline and rules interpretation cases in more than 140 arbitration hearings and served as the carrier member in numerous Public Law Boards under the RLA. Additionally, he served as a member of Amtrak’s bargaining team and helped develop consumer-driven healthcare proposals in national negotiations, mediation overseen by the National Mediation Board (NMB), and interest arbitration involving multiple unions.
Between 1999 and 2010, Jeff worked as a human resources manager and consultant, where he developed site-specific and company-wide training programs and led classroom instruction, team coaching, and supervisor certification training for a West Coast grocery distributor. He also pioneered a peer-to-peer and team conflict resolution process. As a human resources consultant for a start-up management and accounting firm in South Carolina, Jeff established a human resources function for a small business client and launched an interactive online service to provide customizable HR forms, policies, and management guidelines.
Jeff began his career with Norfolk Southern as a Labor Relations Specialist, where he investigated and prepared timely responses to claims and discipline appeals, wrote ex parte briefs, and conducted hundreds of grievance meetings with operating and non-operating craft unions as company spokesperson.
Jeff earned a bachelor of arts degree in psychology and a master’s degree in human resources from the University of South Carolina.