California’s restrictions on mandatory anti-union meetings at work are proving more vulnerable to legal challenges than other states’ laws, which are escaping court scrutiny thanks to fuzzy or limited enforcement schemes.

The labor-backed laws, nicknamed “captive audience” meeting bans, have spread to at least 13 states and faced litigation challenging their constitutionality in California, Connecticut, Illinois, and Minnesota.

Only one of the five lawsuits yielded a ruling to block a state’s law, a challenge led by the California Chamber of Commerce. State officials have asked the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit to overturn that injunction.

Legal challengers elsewhere have failed — with most of their cases pending appeal — without reaching the merits because of hurdles such as sovereign immunity and the absence of imminent enforcement threats in states where the labor commissioner has little or no enforcement authority.

The state laws, passed mostly by Democratic-majority legislatures, aim to block businesses from using mandatory meetings to fight union organizing, and also restrict religious- and political-themed meetings. The laws ban employers from firing or penalizing employees who don’t attend. Coinciding with the state-level fight, Amazon.com Inc. is contesting a 2024 National Labor Relations Board ruling that found captive audience meetings illegal.

“You can’t tell somebody: you can’t speak about this subject. You’re regulating the content of private speech, and that’s the core of the First Amendment,” said Alexander T. MacDonald, an attorney with Littler Mendelson PC whose firm has represented business groups challenging the state laws.

But judges mostly aren’t making it to the First Amendment or claims of preemption by the National Labor Relations Act.

“They want to win on standing,” Judge Richard C. Tallman said of California officials during the Ninth Circuit’s hearing earlier this month. “They don’t want us to reach the merits.”

Kristin Liska, a deputy attorney general for California, told the court the state’s law restricts conduct — employee terminations or discipline — not speech. But she contended the court doesn’t need to reach that issue because the plaintiffs lack standing. They didn’t adequately plead they plan to hold meetings that the law restricts or fire employees who skip them, she said.

Separately, the California Policy Center is asking the Ninth Circuit to revive its challenge, after a lower court found its political focus exempts it from restrictions on meetings related to its policy work.

Business groups have fought this battle before. Opponents of a Wisconsin captive audience law won an injunction in 2010, but a pair of challenges to Oregon’s law were dismissed on standing and ripeness.

Harm to Remedy

Judges in the recent lawsuits keep asking challengers to show what harm the court is being asked to remedy.

The lawsuits are all pre-enforcement challenges, seeking to block laws before any state agency takes action against an employer or an aggrieved worker sues.

The answers keep coming back in the state officials’ favor.

In Minnesota’s case, the Eighth Circuit found state officials named as defendants lack meaningful enforcement powers, reversing the district court’s decision to let the case move forward. The appeals court discounted Gov. Tim Walz’s (D) comment that employers who hold captive audience meetings will go to jail as political rhetoric.

The law doesn’t contain criminal penalties and was written to be enforced primarily through workers’ lawsuits, according to the Eighth Circuit opinion.

The Illinois challenge drew a similar conclusion. Two advocacy and industry groups sued the director of the state’s labor department, but a federal district judge found the law gives the director only an administrative role and funnels all complaints of violations into court via a private right of action. The groups have appealed to the Seventh Circuit.

Connecticut’s law, which kicked off the recent wave of captive audience bans in 2022, empowers the state labor commissioner to investigate alleged violations and seek civil penalties. But a federal judge rejected the Connecticut business group CBIA’s challenge for lack of imminent enforcement threat. CBIA is appealing to the Second Circuit.

A state Labor Department official told the court it views CBIA meetings that cover its policy positions as exempt from the law’s restrictions and won’t take enforcement action related to them.

California’s law also gives the state labor commissioner authority to cite and penalize businesses for violations, calling for fines of at least $500 per employee per violation.

Chilling Effect

As the litigation proceeds, employers are deciding how to respond to the meeting restrictions — whether to stop holding mandatory anti-union meetings or take a chance on enforcement action with the expectation they can get the law overturned in court once there’s a live controversy.

“That risk calculus is different for different people, so you’re seeing mixed responses,” MacDonald said. Even a federal appeals court ruling to strike down one law, such as California’s, isn’t likely to spur states in other circuits to drop their laws, he said.

At least a couple of union officials report signs that employers might be backing away from mandatory anti-union meetings.

In Rhode Island, the state’s AFL-CIO chapter leadership hasn’t heard of any employers holding those meetings since that state’s law took effect July 2, 2025, said Patrick Crowley, the chapter’s president.

Prior to passage, “in nearly every campaign we had reports of some form of captive audience meeting,” he said.

In Alaska, “the two most recent organizing efforts that I am aware of (University of Alaska and Conoco Phillips) seem to have happened without anyone using this provision,” said Joelle Hall, president of the Alaska AFL-CIO. “I assume there is some deterrent effect.”

Deterring employers from holding the meetings is the point, even if the lawmakers who passed these measures suspected courts would strike them down, MacDonald said. Keeping them on the books without active enforcement is likely strategic, he added.

“These laws exist in some sense just as a ‘beware’ sign,” MacDonald said. “The first agency that attempts to enforce one of these, they’re signing a death warrant for the law.”