Another one bites the dust: NLRB General Counsel intends to dump key employer tool

For over 68 years, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) has recognized the right of employers and unions to hold captive audience speeches. NLRB General Counsel Jennifer Abruzzo has made it clear she intends to ask the Board to no longer allow captive audience meetings, effectively changing how employers have addressed union campaigns for the last 6+ decades.

Captive Audience rule

The captive audience rule has been in place since 1953, when the NLRB issued its decision in Peerless Plywood Company and decided what the rules should be in election cases with respect to captive audience speeches. A captive audience speech is one held on company time to massed assemblies of employees by either the employer or a union, a tool used by employers in the vast majority of cases.

In Peerless, the Board noted that in its experience with conducting representation elections, “last minute speeches by either employers or unions delivered to mass assemblies of employees on company time have an unwholesome and unsettling effect and tend to interfere with the sober and thoughtful choice which a free election is designed to reflect.” The real vice in captive audience speeches was the last minute character of the speech. Such a speech, because of its timing, tended to create a mass psychology that overruled arguments made through other campaign media and gave unfair advantage to the party who effectively got in the last word.