In recent years, states across the United States – including New York, Illinois, California, and Hawaii – have enacted captive audience meeting laws that prohibit mandatory employee meetings about employers’ political or religious positions. As Minnesota’s captive audience meeting law demonstrates, the prohibition includes meetings about an employer’s opposition to unionization of their employees. With the adoption of these laws, employers can no longer force employees to listen to employers’ anti-union messaging or retaliate against any employee who declines to attend a meeting about an employer’s position regarding unions.
The National Labor Relations Board (“NLRB”) recently ruled that captive audience meetings violate the law, the National Labor Relations Act specifically. In Amazon.com Services LLC, the NLRB established a fundamental point of law that bans anti-union captive audience meetings. The NLRB so ruled given Amazon’s response to unionization efforts at the Amazon Staten Island warehouse in 2022. Before the NLRB-supervised election regarding whether Amazon employees will unionize, Amazon held “hundreds of meetings” to discourage unionization. Like the captive audience meetings enacted by states around the nation, the NLRB’s decision better protects employee freedom to make their own choices when exercising their rights while ensuring that employers can convey their views about unionization in a noncoercive manner. In short, the NLRB has expanded anti-retaliation protections for employees.
The NLRB’s decision is another example of the important advances made concerning employee rights and workplace protections, both under labor & employment law and under civil rights statutes, that have been achieved during the Biden Administration through the essential work of numerous law enforcement agencies. Those agencies include the United States Department of Labor, the Federal Trade Commission, the United States Securities and Exchange Commission, the United States Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and the United States Department of Justice in addition to the NLRB.
