It Is Lawful, NOT To Tell Line Workers That An All-Hands Meeting AGAINST Unions... Is "Voluntary" -- But It Is... A Cheap Tactic, Condor Sez...

After losing the first vote literally just across the street, on Staten Island. . . Amazon's labor relations geniuses switched up their tactics.

During the campaign Amazon lost, work stoppages and the ensuing meetings were mandatory. All employees, because the company was still paying them by the hour to be on the clock, had to attend. Discipline was meted out for failure to attend.

Now, as the new, second campaign across the street has unfolded, Amazon managers have conceded that the meetings are technically voluntary. . . but only here, as voting is underway. As before, in the first campaign, the company pushed its anti-union messages in "cattle call" meetings, often at start of shift, so the workers would have to keep working after the meeting. The prior approach was to let the shift end on the end of the meeting.

In either case, it is my experienced opinion that withholding an important fact (whether a meeting is required, or optional -- for example) does not engender trust, in any reasonably sensible workforce. So, either way, I am going to predict that the union has won the second vote on Staten Island. We should hear one way or another by Friday night. Here's the latest story on the state of the play, from The Independent:

. . .The work stoppages weren’t intended to give workers a break, but to funnel them into captive-audience meetings wherein LDJ5 managers -- as well as union-busting consultants and managers from other states -- would extol the virtues of Amazon and denounce the union. . . .

After the conveyors shut down, workers are shuffled toward the back of the warehouse. “Managers start corralling people,” says Mitchell-Israel. “They start coming around like, ‘hey, we got a meeting in the back.’” The managers -- anywhere from 10 to 20 on a given day -- don’t tell workers the meeting is about the union. “[Managers] just say it’s a meeting with the vice president of HR, the general manager is going to speak,” says Mitchell-Israel.

So-called captive-audience meetings are typically mandatory, management-led meetings held during working hours to counter pro-union messaging and sow anti-union sentiments. . . .

Multiple workers at LDJ5 say that those who hadn’t been recorded attending a meeting would be approached one-on-one by a manager, taken off the floor, and asked to watch a video of the anti-union speech, which lasts roughly half an hour. It’s unclear how many workers at LDJ5 were aware that the meetings weren’t mandatory and how many refused to watch the video. . . .

As I say -- these are decidedly-last century tactics. . . and the emerging trend data shows. . . they do not work, in the new millennium -- not any more. Damn.

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