By Bob Hennelly

New York State employers will no longer be able to force employees to attend so-called “captive meetings,” which corporations like Starbucks and Amazon use to undermine union organizing. 

Gov. Kathy Hochul today signed legislation at the New York City Central Labor Council’s 2023 Labor Day Parade breakfast, aimed at ending the practice.  

“What we do here will set the narrative…set the bar high for the rest of the nation to follow because this is New York, this is the birthplace of the labor movement and it’s critical we unionize more workers,” Hochul said at 32 BJ SEIU’s Manhattan Headquarters.

The governor also took the occasion to sign a bill making wage theft a larceny prosecutable as a criminal violation of the law, as well as another measure to increase workers compensation benefits for low-wage workers who are sidelined by a workplace injury.

“I want to thank all of you, all of our leaders here who continue in the legacy of our forefathers and foremothers who fought in the streets for worker protections,” Hochul told the audience of labor leaders. “It was long, and it was hard — a lot of struggles, and today we are the beneficiaries of these fights. But the fights continue because people always try to find ways to shortchange our workers…to leave them with less money in their pockets because it benefits them.”

Hochul described how she saw first-hand the power of the union movement and collective action to “lift my grandfather and his brothers out of great poverty, gave them a whole new lease in life.”

“Grandpa was a steelworker,” she said. “His brothers were pipefitters and longshoremen and iron workers. Uncle Tommy was an ironworker, Uncle Billy was a plumber.” 

Hochul continued, “I saw what this did to their families, no one thought about the poverty anymore. They said, ‘We've made it. We've arrived. We can buy a house. We can get a car. We can raise eight kids – in an attic in a small house, but at least we have a house.’ That's what we had.” 

As an aside, Hochul observed that while New York State had bragging rights as the birthplace of the American labor movement, it has been surpassed by Hawaii, for highest labor union density in the nation. “I am not sure how they creeped above us,” Hochul said.

In Hawaii, 23.4 percent of the workforce is in a union. Here in New York, the latest data shows a decline, going from 24.1 percent in 2021 to 22.1 percent last year, one of the largest declines of the 23 states that recorded a drop in union density.

Despite increased organizing and strike activity here in New York and the country, the percentage of workers actually represented by a union dropped in the nation from 10.3 percent in 2021 to 10.1 percent in 2022. That’s about half of the density of the early 1980s, before President Reagan fired all of the nation’s striking air traffic controllers, which emboldened employers to resist organizing efforts and to force them out where they were in place.  

Senator Jessica Ramos (D-Queens) is chair of the Senate’s Labor Committee, a former union organizer and the lead sponsor of the legislation prohibiting employers from punishing employees who opt not to attend so-called “captive meetings.”

Ramos said in an interview that the way to get the state’s union density moving in the right direction is “to pass laws that will make it easier to organize” and by making sure that as a matter of law “workers are not forced to endure anti-union propaganda and the intimidation that comes along with it so that they can freely organize.”  

Ramos thinks more has to be done to level a playing field that’s been slanted for far too long toward employers. She favors enacting “more stringent penalties, for example, taking away a license to do business if you are not able to do it responsibly, and human ethics come into play ensuring that an employer is treating workers as they should be.”

Last month, Pro-Publica reported that between 2017 and 2021 “more than $203 million in wages had been stolen from about 127,000 workers in New York.”

“The amount of wage theft is almost certainly a significant undercount, according to the U.S. Department of Labor,” the non-profit news source reported. “In 2014, for instance, the agency analyzed census and employment data to compare the reported wages of New York workers against what they should make under local minimum wage, and it estimated that state employers steal up to $1 billion from their workers every year.”

In a major breakthrough on the federal level for increasing organizing, the National Labor Relations Board  recently issued a landmark decision  “announcing a new framework for determining when employers are required to bargain with unions without a representation election,” the board said in a press release.

From now on, when a union requests recognition on the basis of support from a majority of employees, “an employer must either recognize and bargain with the union or promptly file” seeking an election. “However, if an employer who seeks an election commits any unfair labor practice that would require setting aside the election, the petition will be dismissed, and – rather than re-running the election – the Board will order the employer to recognize and bargain with the union.”

Bloomberg Law recently reported that the union organizing Trader Joe’s on the Lower East Side, which lost its April recognition vote in a tie, was the first to file for relief under the NLRB’s new framework.