Harold Meyerson writes here about Jennifer Abruzzo’s request to the National Labor Relations Board to ban “captive audience” meetings, in which employers lecture their employees about the dangers of joining a union. Abruzzo is the recently appointed general counsel of the agency, where she has worked for many years. She is in a hurry to restore the original purpose of the NLRB, which was to create a level field for employers and employees.
Meyerson writes in The American Prospect:
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.
I love it! I’ve been close to and a part of the labor movement most of my working life–and practiced labor relations–and I’m really happy–and hopeful–as this is happening. For too long labor leaders and their agents have failed to challenge the whittling away of their/our rights. God bless Jennifer Abruzzo!
Yes!!!
Starbucks annual revenue of 23 billion (taxed at 5.52%), Amazon at 469 billion (taxed at 6 percent). I chuckle at “the dangers of joining a union.”
Elections have consequences. To those folks who say that both parties are equally evil and to vote for a Democratic candidate is a sin against humanity, I say baloney. Biden isn’t perfect BUT we would have never had Jennifer Abruzzo and Ketanji Brown Jackson with a Trump or other GOP deplorable. Of course people like Chris Hedges refuse to vote for Democrats; they will retain their supposed moral superiority by voting Green (Jill Stein who polled at about 3%), thus assuring that Trump (or DeSantis) will win. I will admit, when it comes to education, both parties are very disappointing though DeVos was worse than Dr. Miguel A. Cardona.
Today’s GOP, the crazy party, from huffingtonpostdotcom, quote: (Josh) Hawley was the first to criticize (Kentanji Brown) Jackson by calling her soft on child pornography offenders last month. He argued that she wrongfully handed out light sentences to people who possessed child sexual abuse images, even though her record in those cases was typical for a federal district judge.
Hawley’s criticism resonated with far-right conspiracy theorists who believe Democrats are involved in child sex trafficking rings, and on Monday, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) declared that any senator who supports Jackson’s nomination is actually “pro-pedophile.” end quote
The GOP is a train wreck that offers nothing positive or progressive.
Joe Jersey,
Exactly. So what if voting for the Democrat only results in getting a small amount of what we want instead of the whole thing? Getting only that small amount of progress is the direct result of the folks who said it didn’t matter if we had a Democrat or Republican and were content for a right wing Republican who would enshrine a far right Supreme Court that would not be able to overturn Citizens United for decades. A right wing court that doesn’t protect voting rights.
Biden was never the right wing corporatist that some complicit folks on the left were painting him as in order to help the Republicans and suppress the vote. It is very lucky Biden won, because not only did this country make some (albeit small) leftward progress, but with a 2nd Trump victory, most likely folks like Chris Hedges would already be silenced. Just look at Russia to see the model for how the Republicans — with help from the complicit media and the far right Supreme Court — will enshrine their version of “democracy” if they are able to win the presidency again. It will be too late. Anyone believe that Russia is on the path to a progressive future? Even if Putin is gone, the enshrining of the Putin/Republican far right version of “democracy” does not bode well for their future. Nor for us here.
Yes!!!
Well said, NYC PSP!
Joe Jersey, I was one of those who wasn’t a fan of the fellow whom I called Status Quo Joe. Joe Biden has proved me wrong about that. He’s an outstanding president. It’s just sickening that a couple extremists–Manchin and Sinema–can hold up President Biden’s work. Shame upon them!
I agree, but… Ahem. If it weren’t for Candidate Sanders, President Biden would be a different president than he is. Labor wins when labor fights, not when labor accepts the difficulties of politics. I’m proud of the work I did for the Bernie 2020 campaign, prouder of that than of the work I did for the Biden-Harris campaign after Senator Sanders dropped out. When we fight, we win! When we go along to get along, we lose.