Amazon's Captive Staff Meetings On Unions Illegal, U.S. Labor Director Finds

A U.S. labor board official determined Amazon.com Inc violated federal law during mandatory staff meetings it held in New York to discourage unionization, a board spokesperson said Friday, in what could lead to a new legal precedent.

The Amazon Labor Union (ALU) in March filed a complaint alleging that in so-called captive audience trainings to warn employees about unions, the retailer made threats and kicked out staff in favoring of organizing.

Now, the regional director of the Brooklyn-based office of the National Labor Relations Board has found merit to the allegations, in potentially one of the first instances that the captive-audience practices have been deemed illegal, board spokesperson Kayla Blado said. If the parties do not settle, the director will issue a complaint that could be litigated up to the NLRB at the federal level.

Amazon's mandatory meetings in recent years have been a flashpoint for labor organizers who have sought to represent employees at the second-largest U.S. private employer but lacked an equal venue to counter its point of view. Employees at the New York facility elected to join the ALU within weeks of the March complaint, the first time an Amazon warehouse ever voted to unionize in the United States.

Amazon, which has said the Brooklyn-based region appeared to have a pro-union bias, and the ALU did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Last month, the NLRB's top lawyer, Jennifer Abruzzo, asked the board to ban businesses from making workers attend anti-union meetings, saying they were inconsistent with employees' freedom of choice. In a future case, Abruzzo said she would ask the board to overturn its own precedent dating back to the 1940s that says the meetings are legal.

Joe Biden, viewed as the most pro-union U.S. president in decades, last year appointed Abruzzo as general counsel, a position independent from the five-person NLRB.