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