Above photo: Workers preparing same-day orders during Cyber Monday at an Amazon fulfillment center in Tampa, Florida, on November 27, 2023. Octavio Jones / Getty Images.
Captive audience meetings are a key tool for bosses to destroy union drives.
With last week’s outlawing of such meetings by the National Labor Relations Board, labor has a window to take advantage before Donald Trump scales back worker rights.
On Tuesday of last week, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) ruled that mandatory meetings in which employees are forced to listen to employer diatribes concerning their labor rights are unlawful. The mandatory meetings are often referred to as “captive audience meetings.” Designed to halt union organizing momentum and scare workers into voting against unions, such meetings are a key tactic in bosses’ anti-union playbook and devastating for organizing workers trying to better their lives.
In 2022, NLRB general counsel Jennifer Abruzzo issued a memo in which she announced that she would ask the NLRB to find captive audience meetings unlawful. In her memo, Abruzzo put it bluntly when it comes to captive audience meetings: “This license to coerce is an anomaly in labor law, inconsistent with the [National Labor Relations Act (NLRA)]’s protection of employees’ free choice.”
There is a reason companies opposed to worker organizing favor the use of captive audience meetings to berate and intimidate workers: the coercive meetings are effective. According to one study, the chance of employees winning a union drops in correlation with the number of captive audience meetings held. Captive audience meetings are conducted in about 90 percent of worker organizing campaigns.
Whether these meetings are conducted by management, paid consultants, or lawyers, the product is usually the same: workers are subjected to hours of misinformation, subtle threats, and exhausting pressure. As the late former union buster Martin Levitt once said, “The only way to bust a union is to lie, distort, manipulate, threaten, and always, always attack.”
The board’s ruling highlighted several ways in which captive audience meetings infringe upon employees’ rights under Section 7 of the NLRA. First, by compelling attendance, employers restrict employees’ ability to freely choose whether or not to participate in union-related discussions. Second, these meetings allow employers to monitor employee sentiment and gauge the effectiveness of their anti-union messaging. Finally, the threat of discipline or discharge for nonattendance creates a coercive environment that can pressure employees to adopt the employer’s viewpoint.
The NLRB’s ruling on captive audience meetings is a huge win for workers and devastating for the union-busting industry and its clients. Removing one of the most potent tactics in the union-buster toolbox gives workers more freedom to decide how they want to advocate for better living standards for themselves, their families, and their communities. Over half of workers in America want a union in order to achieve those goals, but a majority are denied those rights through coercive employer attacks like captive audience meetings.
Donald Trump will assume the presidency in January. He and his corporate allies are already challenging the constitutionality of the NLRB and will likely try to rescind this decision on captive audience meetings and return to the norm of bosses being able to suppress workers’ federal, constitutional, and human rights. That makes it essential for the labor movement to move fast in the wake of this decision.
LaborLab, a nonprofit organization dedicated to opposing employer coercion and intimidation where I work, is launching an effort to ensure every union and worker center in the country is aware of the law. Depending on what happens in the next two months with NLRB appointments, we expect the labor movement to have six months to two years to take advantage of this new legal reality as much as possible. That takes steady and consistent action.
Prior to the NLRB’s decision, a dozen states had passed their own laws banning captive audience meetings in relation to politics, religion, and anti-union propaganda. Alaska, the most recent state to ban the practice, did so through a ballot initiative this year. Roughly a hundred million Americans are now protected by state laws in addition to federal law when it comes to coercive mandatory meetings. However, adherence to state bans has historically been frustratingly low.
LaborLab has been working with workers who were subjected to captive audience meetings in states that ban them. Workers at Portland barge-maker Gunderson Marine and Iron recently lost a union election to join Boilermakers Local 104. Three weeks prior, Gunderson hired Employer Labor Solutions, a union-busting firm based in Lakeway, Texas. This firm held mandatory anti-union meetings. The reality was that neither the workers nor the organizers were aware of the state laws banning coercive mandatory meetings and thought they were required to attend the meetings. Had the workers been aware of their rights under Oregon state law and rejected attendance at these meetings, the union vote might have gone a different way.
With union popularity at unprecedented levels and interest in organizing continuing to surge, we have a unique opportunity to move the needle on winning worker elections, even on the eve of Trump assuming office. The ruling on captive audience meetings provides a significant boost to these efforts, as long as the labor movement meets the moment.
Bob Funk is the founder and executive director of LaborLab.