Background. In early April, National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) General Counsel Jennifer Abruzzo issued a memo indicating that “she will ask the Board to find mandatory meetings in which employees are forced to listen to employer speech concerning the exercise of their statutory labor rights, including captive audience meetings, a violation of the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA).”
Less than a week later, GC Abruzzo filed a brief in a case called Cemex, in which Abruzzo “seeks to (1) ban so-called “captive audience” meetings, (2) eliminate the ability of employers to insist on secret-ballot elections, and (3) restrict an employer’s right to inform employees about how the employer-employee relationship may change with union representation,” noted the attorneys at Perkins Coie.
The Lawsuit. Then, in mid-July, the Texas Public Policy Foundation’s litigation center, the Center for the American Future, sued the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) for “violating the First Amendment in its unlawful attempt to silence employer speech.”
“The Center for the American Future advances Tenth Amendment principles through opposition to federal abuse in the areas of environmental, private property, and business autonomy rights,” according to its website.
In that mission, the Center “launches legal challenges to government overreach at the administrative, district and appellate court levels and represents clients whose lives and liberty are threatened by federal-government action in defiance of the Constitution.”
In this episode of Labor Relations Radio, host Peter List talks with Matt Miller, one of the attorneys involved in the lawsuit against the NLRB and GC Abruzzo.
Matt Miller is a senior attorney in the Center for the American Future.
According to his bio, before joining the Foundation, Matt served as the managing attorney of the Texas Office of the Institute for Justice for nine years and later as a senior attorney at the Goldwater Institute for almost four years.
Be sure to check out other projects the Texas Public Policy Foundation is involved with here.
Read the TPPF lawsuit here [in PDF]
Related: Texans sue NLRB over alleged constitutional violations
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