The work of Catholic Law Professor Roger Hartley was recently referenced in a Reuters article regarding Jennifer Abruzzo, the National Labor Relations Board’s general counsel, and her recent move to overturn precedent that allows employers to force workers to attend anti-union meetings, seeking to blunt one of U.S. businesses’ most potent weapons against worker organizing. Hartley’s 2010 law review article, “Freedom Not To Listen: A Constitutional Analysis of Compulsory Indoctrination Through Workplace Captive Audience Meetings,” was referenced as evidence to support Abruzzo’s proposition that mandatory meetings are inherently unlawful.
Reuters
Date: April 13, 2022
By: Hassan Kanu
Why the labor board wants to free 'captive' workers from bosses' messaging
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The labor board held in 1946 that captive audience meetings discussing unionization were per se (inherently) unlawful, shortly after enactment of the National Labor Relations Act, Roger Hartley wrote in a 2010 law review article on employees’ “freedom not to listen.” Hartley is a law professor at the Catholic University of America Columbus School of Law.
But that interpretation was short-lived.
Big businesses complained that the board was restricting free speech, and lawmakers accepted their protests with hardly any serious interrogation, according to the legislative record. Congress amended the NLRA just a year later, in 1947, adding that the “expressing of any views, arguments or opinion” can’t be considered an unfair labor practice.
That new provision, Section 8 (C), was in turn interpreted in a one-line statement of law, when the board held in 1948 that it means captive audience meetings are permissible.
But a “close examination of the legislative history reveals no basis for such a conclusion,” Hartley wrote. And the clause itself says nothing at all about mandatory meetings during work hours.
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The “Constitution's free speech guarantees simply do not provide any person the freedom to coerce listening,” Hartley wrote in the 2010 article.
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For the full article, click here.