Apple Store employees who are organizing in Atlanta have accused the company of union busting and violating the National Labor Relations Act. The Communications Workers of America submitted an Unfair Labor Practice filing on behalf of workers at the Cumberland Mall store. The filing claims that Apple "has conducted mandatory 'captive audience' meetings with bargaining unit employees regarding the upcoming election."
For decades, companies have been allowed to conduct captive audience meetings until 24 hours before a union election begins. Employers typically use these mandatory meetings to deliver anti-union messaging.
Captive Audience sub download
Union drives are in progress at other Apple Store locations. Earlier this month, it was reported that Apple gave retail store managers anti-union talking points to use in daily "download" meetings that take place before shifts.
Captive audience meetings can serve as a proper counterbalance to arguments advanced by organized labor outside the workforce and sometimes within employee homes, which are generally off-limits to employers in this context, noted Reyburn Lominack III, an attorney with Fisher Phillips in Columbia, S.C. "Because the employer is generally paying employees for their time during such meetings, they have long been recognized as a lawful extension of free-speech rights in the absence of improper statements or conduct," he said.
For nearly seventy years, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB or "Board") and various courts have interpreted the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA or "Act") as permitting employers to give captive audience meetings during labor organizational campaigns in the private-sector. Employees, in the midst of deciding whether to join a union, must attend such meetings where "labor relations consultants" usually dictate management's views about the evils of unionism. These meeting occur during working hours, when management is best situated to shackle employees through the exertion of its economic authority and to play on fears of job loss if employees vote in favor of unionization. During these meetings, employees are not permitted to question the employer representative and employers are not obligated to provide the union access to the workplace to present opposing views. While in a formal sense employees are free to leave these meetings, they do so in reality at the peril of losing their jobs. Put simply, rightfully motivated by the necessity of continued employment for basic economic survival, employees will not miss the threatening subtexts of carefully crafted message. Such messages, while free from overt statutorily prohibited threats of reprisal or promise of benefits, will nonetheless convey the detrimental effects of failing to agree with the employer's anti-union stance. Even though eventual voting on unionization will be completed by secret ballot, most employees by that point seem to lose all interest in supporting a cause that will surely draw their employer's ire. Thus, the central argument of this Chapter is that captive audience meetings are not about employer speech rights at all, but rather amount to coercive conduct against employees in derogation of employees' right to self-organization under the NLRA. Of course, employers are free to express or discuss anti-union views with their employees. However, doing so through the mechanism of forced listening, implied coercion, and fear is conduct that should be regulated under the NLRA. Utilizing the conduct/speech distinction in labor picketing law and sexual harassment law, this Chapter will establish the similar conduct-like nature of captive audience meetings and contend that the Board should make employer captive audience meetings a per se violation of Section 8(a)(1) of the NLRA, as it is conduct that directly interferes with, restrains and/or intimidates employees in Section 7 organizational rights to decide whether they wish to join a union.
LEIDER: We like to say that our consumer is tied to that screen with an eight-foot rubber hose for about five minutes fueling. So we've got this very, very captive audience - and they're bored - there's really no super magic. When people pump gas they have nothing to do.
ZACH SEWARD: I guess advertisers talk about, you know, wanting to reach engaged audiences. And it's sort of a buzzword, but to a degree it's meaningful. It's because you know, you've tuned in to "Mad Men" because you know, you love the show and so whatever advertising they happen to show during it is like, going to resonate more with you.
FOLKENFLIK: At the gas tank, Seward says people may have the urge to look elsewhere, specifically at the smartphones they're holding in their hands. That said, Seward says those 50 million people who stand in front of a Gas Station TV screen each month represent an impressive tally, nearly as much the viral site Upworthy and more than the total digital audience of The Washington Post.
For instance, David Isiah Thomas, an Amazon worker in Bessemer, Alabama, filed complaints with the NLRB saying that after Thomas questioned a manager during a captive audience meeting, he "observed the employer's agent circling his work area for no other purpose than to watch him."
It would be a seismic shift for a commonly-employed tactic, and one that workers at Starbucks and Amazon have said they've attended. Insider's Katherine Long reported that some workers at the Bessmer, Alabama-based Amazon warehouse were swayed against the union after captive audience meetings and anti-union texts.
Workers can be disciplined or discharged if they don't show up to captive audience meetings, or leave early. Abruzzo said that "safeguards" can be established by assuring that attendance is voluntary, and that workers won't have any action taken against them for refraining. The EPI report found that discharges for union activity have risen.
The captive audience meetings, as interpreted by the NLRB starting in with a GOP-majority board in 1953, let employers summon workers into closed meetings to hear anti-union rhetoric and worse. Unions get no right of reply. And workers who miss the meetings face company discipline and punishment.
The result, Bronfenbrenner found in a recent study, was a 73 percent union win rate in recognition elections without captive audience meetings, and a 47 percent win rate in campaigns that included them.
Paranormal Activity succeeds by putting the viewer in the most deviously terrifying position ever imagined by a filmmaker: captive audience to an idiot's home movie. It recreates the experience of being stuck in a room with Micah (pronounced MEEK-uh, or DOOSH-bag), the kind of guy you immediately want to start punching and never stop punching until the punching is done. The kind of guy who spends his free time at the mall, conspicuously checking out 16-year olds while chatting loudly on his Bluetooth headset about hair gels. In short, Micah is a super sweet dude.
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Workplace captive audience meetings are assemblies of employees during paid work time in which employers compel employees to listen to antiunion and other types of proselytizing. Employers enforce attendance at workplace captive audience meetings by threats of discharge. Typically, employers deny employees the right to ask questions or express disagreement with the anti-union views presented during these mandatory meetings. Soon after the enactment of the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) concluded that workplace captive audience meetings discussing unionization are per se unlawful. However, the NLRB reversed course following the enactment of the 1947 Taft-Hartley Amendments to the NLRA, concluding that employer free speech rights immunize captive audience meetings from regulation. This remains the NLRB's view.
In this Article, I demonstrate that employers' First Amendment free speech rights do not preclude a ban on captive audience meetings. Instead, employees are a "captive audience" whom the Constitution protects from being force-fed the employer's religious and political ideology at the workplace. Employers, accordingly, have no free speech right to coerce workplace ideological listening.
The scope of employers' constitutional right to free speech as juxtaposed against employees' freedom not to listen is a timely issue. Several state legislatures are considering--and two have enacted versions of-the Worker Freedom Act, which bans workplace captive audience meetings discussing either religious or political matters. Opponents of the Worker Freedom Act have initiated legal challenges that are in the early stages of litigation, and many more such challenges are anticipated as more states adopt the Worker Freedom Act. The employer's alleged free speech rights, as embodied in these meetings, and preemption of state law by the NLRA will be two key issues in this litigation. This Article demonstrates that the resolution of each of those issues will depend on whether the reviewing court acknowledges that employees have a constitutionally-recognized freedom not to listen.
Context, relevance, and the use of creative, engaging content all contribute to campaign effectiveness and should occur in three distinct stages: brand activation, engagement and amplification. When utilizing place-based media, brands can present compelling messages and content to targeted, captive audiences align with their experience states as mentioned above. 2ff7e9595c
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