Will the NLRB Change Its Position on Captive Audience Speeches?
This is the question that Paul Secunda considers in a new paper, “The Future of NLRB Doctrine on Captive Audience Speeches.” Under established doctrine, employers may require employees who are contemplating unionization to attend meetings at which speeches opposed to unionization are presented. However, the National Labor Relations Board has recently undergone some significant membership changes that could conceivably lead to reconsideration of the “captive audience” doctrine. Paul’s paper describes how this reconsideration might come about and discusses potential outcomes. His conclusion:
I believe the Board will likely not prohibit all captive audience meetings as I believe they could, and should, do under current law. Rather, the Board is likely to engage in a more restrained approach based on already-existing doctrines and cases given the Board’s desire to avoid the misimpression that it is merely engaging in politically-motivated flip-flopping.
Paul’s paper was part of a symposium at Indiana University-Bloomington on labor and employment law under the Obama Administration. The abstract appears after the jump.
When most hear about public employment law, they believe the topic involves unions and collective bargaining between government employers and public employee unions. This is not correct. Although public-sector labor law is an increasingly important area of inquiry given the robust union movement in the public sector, an equally important area concerns the constitutional rights of public employees. This is public employment law. It is important area of the law both because only public employees, with a government employer, have the protections of the federal constitution under the state action doctrine and because of the sheer size of the public workforce in this country: currently around 23 million workers or about 17% of all workers in the United States.