Restaurant employees can no longer be required to attend a meeting where management airs the positives of rejecting union representation, the result of a decision handed down Wednesday by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB).
The ruling, which had been expected, leaves room for employers to make their case for keeping a restaurant or other business union-free, but attendance has to be voluntary, with no repercussions for declining to participate and no record kept of who did or did not show.
The decision follows an expansion of the NLRB’s definition of what constitutes employer threats against employees who might favor unionizing. In another recent ruling, the regulatory body in effect decided that voicing the disadvantages of union representation could be regarded by regulators as the sort of threatening behavior that federal regulations ban.
The narrowing of what’s permissible for employers is seen as a show of force by a regulatory agency that is expected to be significantly reconstituted and bridled by the Trump administration after it takes power in January. Under President Biden, the NLRB has taken an expansive view of its mandate and powers, in keeping with the Democratic White House’s pledge to be the most labor-friendly administration in history.
“The whole labor agenda, all this crap we’ve been dealing with, that’s gone,” Franklin Coley, a principal of the Orlando-based lobbying firm Align Public Strategies, said in the most recent episode of Working Lunch, a government-affairs podcast presented in partnership with Restaurant Business. With Donald Trump setting Republicans’ agenda, “they’re going to try to pull back and unwind a bunch of that stuff.”
“Ensuring that workers can make a truly free choice about whether they want union representation is one of the fundamental goals of the National Labor Relations Act,” NLRB Chairman Lauren McFerran said in explaining Wednesday’s decision by the NLRB. She was referring to the 1935 law that created the board as an election watchdog.
“Captive audience meetings—which give employers near-unfettered freedom to force their message about unionization on workers under threat of discipline or discharge—undermine this important goal,” she continued. “Today’s decision better protects workers’ freedom to make their own choices in exercising their rights.”
Captive-audience meetings have already been banned in a number of states, including California and New York. Such gatherings have traditionally preceded about 90% of workplace elections that have been greenlighted by the NLRB to determine if a staff wants union representation.
The NLRB has frequently been accused of showing a pro-union bias. Some critics from the restaurant industry have complained about a seat on the five-person board being held by David Prouty, an alumnus of the two biggest unions in the hospitality business, Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and Unite Here.
The SEIU is a benefactor of Starbucks Workers United, the union that has organized more than 500 Starbucks units.
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