Under new law, Illinois employers can’t force workers to sit through anti-union meetings

[August 01, 2024]  By HANNAH MEISEL
Capitol News Illinois
[e-mail]

ROSEMONT – Gov. JB Pritzker on Wednesday signed legislation aimed at curtailing the practice of “captive audience” meetings – a strategy businesses sometimes use to dissuade workers from forming a union.

The law, dubbed the “Worker Freedom of Speech Act,” was a top priority this spring for organized labor groups in Illinois, which played host to Pritzker’s bill signing at the Illinois AFL-CIO's biennial convention.

“You're helping every worker in the state of Illinois,” the governor told the hundreds of organized labor members and leaders gathered in a suburban Chicago hotel ballroom. “And as people recognize that more and more, they organize and they join a union.”

The Worker Freedom of Speech Act passed the General Assembly this spring with mostly Democratic support and just a few Republicans crossing the aisle.

When the law goes into effect on Jan. 1, Illinois will become the eighth state to make it illegal for companies to punish their workers for opting out of a meeting in which they’d be subjected to the employer’s views on religious or political matters – including unionization – or rewarded for attending.

Workers who believe they were unfairly retaliated against for not attending such meetings can take their employer to court under the law. They can also report their employer to the Illinois Department of Labor, which can levy fines of $1,000 per violation.

AFL-CIO national President Liz Shuler, the keynote speaker for Wednesday’s state convention, praised the legislation before Pritzker signed it. She admonished “rich and powerful” executives like Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, the founder of companies including Tesla, for “stacking the deck against us.”

"They want to sit there and hold their captive audience meetings and make us listen to a bunch of their propaganda,” she said. “I say bullshit.”

A number of other states are considering similar legislation, according to research from the Economic Policy Institute, amid a wave of high-profile union drives across the country in recent years. But business groups have sued over Minnesota and Connecticut’s laws, claiming employers’ First Amendment rights are being infringed upon.

The Worker Freedom of Speech Act follows Illinois voters’ approval of the “Workers’ Rights Amendment” to the state constitution in the November 2022 election, which established a “fundamental right” for Illinois workers to unionize and engage in collective bargaining with their employers.

After signing legislation aimed at curtailing the practice of what sponsors dubbed “captive audience meetings,” in which workers are required to listen to their employer’s religious or political views, Gov. JB Pritzker poses with the bill at the Illinois AFL-CIO's biennial convention in Rosemont on Wednesday. Pritzker is flanked by AFL-CIO's national president Liz Shuler and the state organization’s president Tim Drea (left) and state Rep. Marcus Evans, D-Chicago (right), along with other proponents of the bill. (Capitol News Illinois photo by Hannah Meisel)

It also prohibits both state and local governments from ever enacting “right-to-work" laws, which bar employers from requiring workers to be union members to keep their jobs. As a result, unionization rates are lower in those states.

Right-to-work laws have seen a resurgence in Republican-controlled states in the last decade or so after an initial wave of southern and rural states adopted such laws in the 1940s and ‘50s.

Pritzker on Tuesday criticized his predecessor, Republican Gov. Bruce Rauner, who he said “declared war on the labor movement.” He was referring to the one-term governor’s frequent scapegoating of public employee unions for the years of budget deficits Illinois had seen by the time he took office in 2015.

“He held the state's budget hostage, and the ransom that he demanded – you remember?” Pritzker asked the audience, recalling the two years the state went without a budget amid Rauner’s political fight with Democrats aligned with organized labor. “It was that Illinois should become a right-to-work state. We're not going to let that happen.”

Shuler also warned the audience of “Project 2025” – a policy blueprint authored by the conservative Heritage Foundation and former staffers for President Donald Trump.

She pointed to parts of the wide-ranging 900-page document concerning labor law, including what she characterized as a goal “to eliminate public sector unions” if Trump gets a second term as president in November.

“Is that a wake-up call?” she asked. “Project 2025 would eliminate the OSHA enforcement and penalties, so that companies get a slap on the wrist if they have a fatality at the workplace. That's Project 2025.”

Capitol News Illinois is a nonprofit, nonpartisan news service covering state government. It is distributed to hundreds of newspapers, radio and TV stations statewide. It is funded primarily by the Illinois Press Foundation and the Robert R. McCormick Foundation, along with major contributions from the Illinois Broadcasters Foundation and Southern Illinois Editorial Association.