The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) issued a decision on Wednesday barring employers from requiring workers to attend meetings that are political or religious in nature — including meetings meant to quell workers’ unionization efforts.

Such gatherings, known as “captive audience” meetings, are held during workdays, and involve employers trying to coerce their employees into taking an action of some kind. Bosses typically threaten their workers with discipline or even termination if they refuse to attend.

The specific case that the NLRB examined this week dealt with an Amazon facility in New York City, which became the first of the company’s warehouses to unionize in 2022. In the days leading up to the vote for unionization, Amazon held meetings where they required workers to hear anti-union statements from paid consultants, in a failed attempt to get workers to vote against the union.

The 3-1 decision from the NLRB found that those meetings violated federal law, ruling that such meetings”have a reasonable tendency to interfere with and coerce employees in the exercise” of their rights, including in deciding whether they should form unions.

Federal law “does not license employers to compel employees, on pain of discipline or discharge, to attend meetings where they are forced to listen to the employer’s views,” the NLRB’s ruling went on.

NLRB Chair Lauren McFerran added:

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. 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.

The decision on Wednesday “protects workers’ freedom to make their own choices in exercising their rights,”........

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