Published
November 18, 2024
If you have a job, you have no doubt experienced a staff meeting of one form or another. When your employer wants to share information about a topic, they gather workers together to discuss the matter. Since these are on work time, you get paid, and your employer can require attendance.
According to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), however, these meetings are against the law if one topic is raised—labor unions.
On November 13, the Board issued a decision in Amazon.com Services LLC in which it declared that employers may not require employees to attend meetings in which the employer expresses its views on unionization, something the current General Counsel had been seeking for over two years.
In doing so, the Board upended more than 75 years of precedent by overruling its 1948 decision in Babcock & Wilcox Co., which the Board majority said “is flawed as a matter of statutory policy.” Under that decision, the NLRB held that employers may share their views on unionization in employee meetings “if such expression contains no threat of reprisal or force or promise of benefit.”
According to the NLRB majority, since employees can be disciplined for not attending mandatory meetings, “compelling employees to attend a captive-audience meeting effectively conditions their employment on the abandonment of their Section 7 rights.” Thus, such meetings to discuss unionizing are inherently unlawful.
In dissent, Member Marvin Kaplan wrote, “the majority’s attempt to ban so-called ‘captive-audience speeches’ harkens back to an earlier era when the Board sought to impose on employers a policy of strict neutrality regarding unionization,” and “the conflict between the majority’s prohibition of captive-audience speeches and the Constitution is manifest and irreconcilable.”
Continuing with its theme of violating free speech rights, on November 8, the Board also ruled in Siren Retail Corp d/b/a Starbucks that it will now be an unfair labor practice for employers to tell employees that their relationship with management will change if the company is unionized. Considering that the entire purpose of elections under the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) is to change the relationship between employers and employees, the ruling makes little sense.
Yet, the Board justified its dubious position by arguing that such statements are not “carefully phrased on the basis of objective fact to convey an employer’s belief as to demonstrably probable consequences beyond [its] control.” Instead, the decision to “change” the relationship somehow is up to the employer, as opposed to mandated by the statute.
Of course, how long these rulings will be relevant remains to be seen, given legal challenges sure to ensue. In any event, both are likely to be short-lived after Inauguration Day.
About the authors
Sean P. Redmond
Sean P. Redmond is Vice President, Labor Policy at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
