Business groups sue over California’s new ban on captive audience meetings

California business groups have sued to stop the state from implementing a new law that prohibits companies from ordering workers to attend meetings on unionization and other matters.

The law, Senate Bill 399, went into effect Jan. 1 and makes it illegal to penalize an employee who refuses to attend a meeting at which their employer discusses its “opinion about religious or political matters,” including whether to join a union.

Unions have long held that these so-called “captive audience meetings” serve to intimidate employees and hinder organizing efforts. The legislation, authored by State Sen. Aisha Wahab (D-Hayward), is among a set of new workplace laws going into effect in California in 2025.

In a federal lawsuit filed on New Year’s Eve in the Eastern District of California, the California Chamber of Commerce and the California Restaurant Assn. contend that the law violates companies’ rights to free speech and equal protection under the 1st and 14th amendments.

The law violates these protections by “discriminating against employers’ viewpoints on political matters, regulating the content of employers’ communications with their employees, and by chilling and prohibiting employer speech,” the lawsuit said. Employers “have the right to communicate with their employees about the employers’ viewpoints on politics, unionization, and other labor issues.”

The suit asks the courts to block the law from going into effect.

“Throughout legislative deliberations, we repeatedly underscored the fact that SB 399 was a huge overreach,” chamber President Jennifer Barrera said in an emailed statement. “SB 399 is clearly viewpoint-based discrimination, which runs afoul of the First Amendment.”

Jot Condie, president of the California Restaurant Assn., said the law “creates restrictions that are unworkable.”

The lawsuit was no surprise, said Lorena Gonzalez, a former state assembly member and current head of the California Labor Federation. She said business groups had threatened to bring a legal challenge during the legislative process, and in response the American Federation of Labor and the Congress of Industrial Organizations had prepared a legal memorandum arguing that the law limits employer conduct, not speech.

She said employers typically hold captive audience meetings after workers have signed union cards indicating their support for a union, and are “one of the most coercive tools employers use to scare workers out of their right to unionize.”

“This isn’t a free speech issue. An employer can still talk crap about unions — they can talk about politics and about religion. They just can’t retaliate against workers who don’t want to sit through their opinions,” Gonzalez said. “Workers also have a 1st Amendment right as well, to be free of being held captive and forced to listen to things that have nothing to do with the actual work.”

California joins at least 10 other states including Alaska, Hawaii, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Vermont, and Washington that have implemented similar bans. Business groups successfully challenged a Wisconsin law in 2010 but similar challenges to Oregon’s law have been dismissed.

A November ruling by the National Labor Relations Board also banned mandatory captive audience meetings. The 3-1 decision reversed the board’s decades-old standard in place since 1948 that allowed for these mandatory meetings.

“Ensuring that workers can make a truly free choice about whether they want union representation is one of the fundamental goals of the National Labor Relations Act,” Democratic chair of the board, Lauren McFerran, said in a statement about the decision.

The ruling stemmed from a complaint over Amazon’s conduct ahead of a 2022 union election at a Staten Island facility, where it held a series of mandatory anti-union meetings. Amazon has said it plans to appeal the decision.