Employers lost one of their favorite union-busting weapons in November when the National Labor Relations Board ruled that captive audience meetings are illegal, reversing a precedent set in 1948.
The decision applies nationwide, building on laws enacted in a dozen states to protect workers from being forced to listen to coercive anti-union rhetoric from their bosses.
The catch is that local unions are being advised to act quickly to take advantage of the rule, which is expected to be overturned at some point after incoming Trump administration appointees take majority control of the five-member board.
“The national ban on captive audience meetings will likely survive for most of 2025, giving the labor movement a brief but incredibly important window to organize more freely,” said Bob Funk, executive director of LaborLab, which studies and combats union busting. “We must rise to meet the occasion."
The law doesn’t prohibit employers from holding anti-union meetings, but it bars mandatory attendance. Companies that discipline, demote, fire or otherwise punish workers who don’t go can face unfair labor practice charges and penalties.
In the absence of such consequences, Funk said, roughly half of all union organizing drives are derailed by management’s force-fed bombast.
“These inherently coercive meetings are the most potent and frequently used tool of the union-busting industry,” he said. “This is the first time every worker in the United States is protected in exercising their freedom to join together in unions — a significant victory that needs to be treated with urgency.”
The decision, which also applies to religious and political speech, rose from a case involving Amazon’s Staten Island, N.Y., warehouse.
Workers there were subjected to hundreds of captive audience meetings, contributing to the failure of an initial organizing drive and leading to the NLRB complaint. But workers kept fighting and in 2022 became the global giant’s first U.S. employees to vote in favor of a union.
NLRB Chair Lauren McFerran joined the board’s two other Democrats in ruling against Amazon, putting an end — for now — to a strong-arm tactic employers have used with impunity for 76 years.
“Ensuring that workers can make a truly free choice about whether they want union representation is one of the fundamental goals of the National Labor Relations Act,” McFerran said, referring to the 1935 law that enshrined the right to organize and join unions, and instructed the federal government to encourage the practice of collective bargaining.
“Captive audience meetings, which give employers near-unfettered freedom to force their message about unionization on workers under threat of discipline or discharge, undermine this important goal,” she said.
Nearly 90% of employers facing organizing campaigns use forced meetings to “intimidate, threaten, and instill fear in workers for the purpose of coercing them to oppose unionization,” according to Economic Policy Institute researchers who analyzed NLRB election data.
Further, companies have reported spending more than $400 million a year on anti-union consultants — an estimate that analysts believe is well below the actual dollar figure due to employers flouting NLRB reporting rules.
Immediately after the Nov. 13 ruling, LaborLab rushed to spread the word through media, social media and letters sent to thousands of union locals and worker advocacy groups.
“We are launching an effort to ensure that every union and worker center in the country is aware of the law,” Funk said, noting that even in states with captive audience bans, organizing drives have failed due to lack of awareness.
International President Kenneth W. Cooper urged IBEW locals to jump on the new rule, praising it as the latest of many historic advances for workers during the pro-union tenure of President Joe Biden and his appointees, particularly NLRB General Counsel Jennifer Abruzzo.
“Right now, thanks to the Biden NLRB, the doors to organizing are open wider than they’ve ever been in our lifetimes,” Cooper said. “We’ve made enormous progress the past four years, but experience tells us that the fight is about to get a lot harder.
“Sooner or later in 2025, anti-worker appointees will once again control the NLRB, and we know that bringing back captive audience meetings will be one of their highest priorities,” he said.
Whatever happens to the national ban, it won’t affect the 12 states where legislative action or voter referendums have blocked forced meetings.
Alaska became the latest state, when 58% of voters approved an initiative that also included provisions for a higher minimum wage and paid sick leave. The others with captive audience bans are California, Connecticut, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Vermont and Washington.
Efforts to pass similar laws are underway in five more states — Massachusetts, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island and Virginia — where one or both legislative chambers are controlled by pro-worker politicians.
“We are committed to working with our union allies to pass those laws,” Cooper said. “Captive audience meetings have deprived far too many workers of their right to join unions and bargain collectively, and we will fight to ban them, and keep them banned, wherever possible.”