The Ways of Unionbusters

The Prospect has a good piece on something I did know about–an anti-union law firm coming to Rhode Island to encourage employers to ignore the state’s laws preventing captive meetings to pressure workers from forming unions.

A management-side labor law firm advised on a private webinar that employers with a “high risk tolerance” could ignore a recent Rhode Island ban on forced employee attendance at anti-union meetings, because the meetings offer “tremendous value” to fighting union elections.

“We are not in the habit of advising you lightly that you should challenge laws,” said Jillian Folger-Hartwell, an attorney with leading anti-union law firm Littler Mendelson on the August 19 webinar, a transcript and PowerPoint presentation of which the Prospect exclusively obtained. But “if you are a bit more risk tolerant, and you want to continue” to hold the meetings, “that is a choice that you can make.”

While acknowledging that this would expose employers to litigation, Folger-Hartwell explained her firm’s view that there are “strong arguments” that the law is unconstitutional, and that ignoring it would be a “vehicle” for a legal challenge.

“I think it’s a classic case of corporate greed,” said Patrick Crowley, president of the Rhode Island AFL-CIO. “We pass a law in the state of Rhode Island and these people think they’re so above the law that they’re advising clients to just ignore it? The arrogance of what they’re saying is just obnoxious.”

Advice that anti-union law firms give companies is not typically made public. But Littler promoted the webinar on its own website. Crowley and other labor officials in Rhode Island organized roughly three dozen union members to attend, but they were kicked off the call. The materials leaked anyway, and they offer a unique window into how Littler and other firms skirt the edges of labor law to help companies prevent collective bargaining among their workers.

In fact, Littler is proud of this reputation. One PowerPoint slide quotes approvingly from a 1996 San Francisco Chronicle article on the firm, in which a union lawyer said, “They’ll do about anything to accomplish their ends. They push the line as far as they possibly can and eventually step over.”

Rhode Island is the most recent of 13 states to ban so-called “captive audience meetings,” which are all-employee assemblies that workers can be disciplined or even terminated for skipping. The meetings, which are heavily scripted by union avoidance consultants, offer a one-sided view of collective bargaining as damaging to businesses and harmful to employees, which could lead to cuts in pay and benefits and tear companies apart.

On the webinar, Folger-Hartwell and her Littler colleague Gregory Tumolo freely admit that captive audience meetings (which they call “mandatory employee education meetings”) are “one of the most effective ways for employers to communicate with employees freely to correct misperceptions and combat union propaganda.”

Unions and their allies have focused on the compulsory nature of these meetings in attempting policy reforms. The Rhode Island law, which passed with overwhelming majorities (30-4 in the state Senate and 71-2 in the House) and was signed into law on July 2, prevents employers from firing or penalizing employees for refusing to attend meetings where the employer expresses views on unionization. (Meetings where political or religious views are discussed also cannot be compulsory.) The ban on adverse actions also holds for refusing to listen to, watch, or read speeches or electronic communications.

Also, good on Rhode Island for making this move to ban captive audience meetings. Labor still matters in this state and while it can be sclerotic on some things nationally, in Rhode Island it mostly does a good job of taking important steps to fight for workers rights and really does matter politically. For example, I was at the annual Rhode Island Labor History Society Labor Day event (actually I will be discussing the historical event that is the setting for this next week in the This Day in Labor History series) and there were quite a few state-level politicians who showed up. You could tell based on how they are dressed. Some of them are there because they are real labor folks and some of them because they know organized labor matters in this state. It’s how you want things to be. But not too many states have labor movements that powerful anymore and they will be a smaller number as Trump continues to rule by fiat.