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APRIL 7, 2022
Meyerson on TAP
Abruzzo Again!
The NLRB's general counsel asks the Board to ban 'captive
audience' meetings, in which workers are compelled to hear
employers' anti-union rants.
By now, it's clear that Jennifer Abruzzo, the general counsel at the
National Labor Relations Board, is both an originalist and an adherent
to the belief that the National Labor Relations Act is a law whose
interpretations must have some relation to current realities.
One of those realities is that a succession of Board and court rulings
over many decades has eroded the act itself, and with it, the very
worker rights the act was written to ensure. One of those erosions is
the "captive audience" meeting, which employees are compelled to attend,
at which their managers subject them to arguments against their going
union. The very fact that attendance is compulsory underscores the
imbalance of power between boss and worker, such that the meetings
constitute an implicit-and sometimes explicit-threat to the workers.
The authors of the NLRA meant to give workers the right to freely choose
whether to unionize. Compelling workers to attend these meetings (and
forbidding union advocates from holding even voluntary meetings at the
worksite), Abruzzo argues, erodes that right of free choice.
In a memo
she sent to NLRB staff today, Abruzzo announced she would ask the Board
to ban such captive audience meetings for violating both the letter and
spirit of the NLRA. The act, she wrote, "protects employees' right to
listen as well as their right to refrain from listening to employer
speech concerning the exercise of their Section 7 rights"-that is,
their rights to freely choose whether or not to unionize and to have a
voice on the job. "Forcing employees to listen to such employer speech
under threat of discipline-directly leveraging the employees'
dependence on their jobs-plainly chills employees' protected right
to refrain from listening to this speech," she asserted.
Today's memo is of a piece with Abruzzo's previous memos, all of
which seek to restore the NLRA to what its authors intended: an act
enabling workers to freely choose whether to organize and, if they do so
choose, to bargain collectively. As I've reported in my profile
of Abruzzo,
which appears in our April print issue, she has emerged as the most
potent champion of worker rights that the government has seen in a great
many years, and as such, by happy coincidence, as the most potent ally
of the generation of workers we've seen unionizing on campuses, at
Starbucks, and now, at an Amazon warehouse.
Abruzzo writes lots of these potentially very impactful memos. I'll
try to keep you posted on them as she turns them out.
~ HAROLD MEYERSON
Follow Harold Meyerson on Twitter
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Adrian Vermeule has a new constitutional theory that hides its religious
foundations. BY MICAH SCHWARTZMAN & RICHARD SCHRAGGER
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