Could a New NLRB Case Limit Bosses’ Best Anti-Union Tool, the Captive Audience Meeting?

[Omaha Steve]

http://inthesetimes.com/working/entry/18820/captive-audience-meeting-nlrb-boss-union


BY SHAUN RICHMAN WEDNESDAY, FEB 3, 2016, 6:09 PM

The captive audience meeting, “management’s most important weapon” in an anti-union campaign, is finally being challenged in a petition to the National Labor Relations Board that could help re-balance the scales in union representation elections.

Held in all-staff, small-group or one-on-one formats, employers use these mandatory meetings to confuse and intimidate employees into voting against union representation. In a 2009 study, labor relations scholar Kate Bronfenbrenner found that nine out of ten employers use captive audience meetings to fight a union organizing drive. Threatening to cut wages and benefits in 47 percent of documented cases, and to go out of business entirely in a staggering 57 percent, these captive audience meetings correlate with an unsurprising 43 percent union win rate when used.

Such meetings were illegal under the original National Labor Relations Act. The courts eventually decided that as long as a boss’s threats were merely implicit, it would be a violation of his putative “free speech” rights for the Labor Board to restrain their ability to make his obvious opinions unavoidable. (The courts still love to use “free speech” as a justification for union-busting; Friedrichs v. CTA, the case that could decimate American public sector unions currently before the court, is a claim of infringement of free speech.)

I recently advocated for an “equal time” provision, that any mandatory on-the-clock discussion of an upcoming union certification vote make room for a pro-union presentation, be incorporated in a new labor law reform bill. But these petitioners to the NLRB—106 of the leading labor-side and neutral-party experts on labor relations (the boss’ lawyers couldn’t bring themselves to endorse the need for fair debate, for some reason)—realized that “equal time” could be made a regulatory rule right now.

FULL story at link.

OS


The case shows the value of thinking bigger in the labor movement.