States Are Cracking Down on a Key Union-Busting Tactic
Illinois and Washington may join several other states in banning captive audience meetings.
Over the past year, pro-labor legislatures have begun scrutinizing one of corporate America’s most important and oft-used union-busting tools: the captive audience meeting.
These meetings are usually held while workers are on the clock, robbing them of the choice to not attend if they’re already convinced that a union is the right move for them. They can include management as well as the high-priced anti-union consultants advising management on how to win a National Labor Relations Board vote, conducted ostensibly to “inform” employees about the consequences of their vote but almost always used to scare and pressure them against unionizing.
An analysis last year of NLRB election documents found that captive audience meetings are used in 89 percent of all union elections, according to the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute.
National Labor Relations Board General Counsel Jennifer Abruzzo said in a 2022 memo that these meetings violate federal labor law. But in the last two years, an effort has simultaneously accelerated at the state level to ban these sessions and others where employers require their workers to sit through political and religious speech.
In the last year alone, New York, Maine, and Minnesota have all joined Connecticut (2022) and Oregon (2010) in banning captive audience meetings, and legislators in more than a half-dozen other states have introduced legislation since 2022 to outlaw such meetings, according to EPI. Last week, Washington’s state senate voted to ban captive audience meetings. (The U.S. Chamber of Commerce has sued Connecticut to block their law.)
This year, Illinois may soon join them, with a bill called the Worker Freedom of Speech Act. The bill is a top priority for both the state AFL-CIO as well as Sen. Robert Peters, the bill’s primary sponsor and the chair of the Senate Labor Committee. (Rep. Marcus Evans, the House Labor and Commerce Chair, has introduced an identical bill in the House of Representatives.)
“This [bill] is in line with moving Illinois forward,” Peters said in an interview with More Perfect Union. “I want us to be the state that protects workers in their workplace so that they’re not having onerous meetings.”
Peters said that he came to the issue of giving workers the ability to decline such meetings through his own experience as a student cafeteria worker at Kansas State University. “There’s a particular potent evangelical movement, and I remember working in the cafeteria and having to hear about one’s views on religion that weren’t necessary to me serving food,” Peters said.
In addition to captive audience meetings, Peters said his priorities this year include legislation banning immigration-based retaliation in the workplace, implementing temporary worker protections passed last year, and updating and strengthening the state’s child labor laws, as a number of states including Florida and neighboring Iowa are actively weakening child labor protections.
“I work on workers’ rights issues and criminal legal issues, and fundamentally this is about having safety at your workplace, at home, and in your life,” Peters said. “That means making sure to protect their voice when they’re at work, and at home and in the street.”
For more, watch our 2022 interview with NLRB General Counsel Jennifer Arbruzzo about captive audience meetings and more:
What’s happening in the states
Virginia Democrat dismisses the “Glenndome”: Sen. Louise Lucas, one of the top Democrats in the legislature, said Monday that Gov. Glenn Young’s dream of a new taxpayer-funded arena to lure the NHL’s Washington Capitals and NBA’s Washington Wizards to northern Virginia is basically dead.
The arena funding package pushed by Youngkin would cost Virginia taxpayers more than $1 billion by some estimates, a massive giveaway to billionaire Ted Leonsis, the owner of both the Capitals and Wizards and a former top executive at AOL. Youngkin and supporters of the deal have promoted it as an economic boon for the northern Virginia economy, in spite of study after analysis after report showing that taxpayer-funded stadium projects almost never provide the economic benefit team owners say they will.
“The governor’s proposed deal has many unanswered questions and potential conflicts of interests,” Lucas, the Senate President Pro Tempore and chair of the Senate Finance Committee, said in a remarkable speech at the start of a hearing Monday. “The governor refuses to negotiate, and simply believes this co-equal branch of government should rubber-stamp the ‘Glenndome’.”
“This Democrat is not conceding to a half-baked ‘Glenndome’ that compromises the Commonwealth’s financial position for his billionaire friends,” she added.
Georgia Senate votes to make union-busting official state policy: The Georgia Senate passed a bill last week that would prohibit state incentives to businesses that voluntarily recognize an employee union when a majority of workers have signed cards, rather than go through the time-consuming and costly NLRB process to persuade employees not to unionize.
Atlanta Sen. Jason Esteves, a Democrat, slammed the bill during the floor vote Thursday while sporting a red bandana on his arm, in honor of West Virginia mineworkers who fought at the Battle of Blair Mountain.
“The lobbyists and the special interests that wrote the bill know that it’s likely not to hold up in court,” Esteves said, according to the Georgia Recorder. “They also know that there are going to be lawsuits over this that are going to suck up taxpayer dollars, and Georgia taxpayers will ultimately be held paying the bill. But they think that they found a loophole, so they want this to be a test case.”
Teamsters fight back against Iowa bill targeting public sector unions: A new bill in Iowa that won initial approval from a Senate committee this week would devastate public employee unions in the state, decertifying units if public employers don’t submit a list of employees to the state.
The only recourse these unions will have, other than accepting decertification, would be to sue employers for the lists, meaning unions will have to take up dozens of legal battles just to retain their ability to represent workers.
In a video posted to YouTube, Jesse Case of the powerful Teamsters Local 238 told members to prepare for “concerted activity, protests, and rolling strikes across the state” against the new bill, which would force his union alone to sue as many as 100 local governments per year. “The bill they’re introducing would effectively end all public sector unions in the state of Iowa,” Case said. “It’s a bad law, and it’s going to affect our members statewide.”
“We’re going to shut down business in the state of Iowa if they shut down unions,” Case said. “We’re not going to let them burn down the house of labor without a fight.”
What we’re reading
The UAW Is Organizing the South | John Nichols, The Nation
How Socialists Won Historic Tenant Protections in Tacoma | Sara Wexler, Jacobin
Backsliding, toothless enforcement are making a mockery of North Carolina’s campaign finance laws | Rob Schofield, North Carolina Newsline
It took me three tries to register to vote in Texas — and I’m an elections reporter | Natalia Contreras, Votebeat/The Texas Tribune
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