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.
Amazon was at the center of the decision. The company had been holding mandatory meetings to dissuade employees from unionizing. This case, involving Amazon’s Staten Island facilities, highlighted the potential for employers to use such meetings to intimidate workers and undermine their right to organize.
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…
Auteur: Bob Funk
