Business

Video game workers found their voices in the pandemic. Could unions be next?

Published

3 years ago

March 19, 2022

Video game workers found their voices in the pandemic. Could unions be next?

With Christmas just a few weeks away, Onah Rongstad had been working round the clock to arrange for the discharge of latest content material in “Name of Responsibility: Warzone,” an entry within the bestselling first-person-shooter franchise.

The 26-year-old was a top quality assurance tester for Raven Software program, a Wisconsin online game studio owned by Santa Monica gaming big Activision Blizzard. She and her teammates have been chargeable for making certain the whole lot within the sport ran easily for gamers — each weapon, animation, character, map and occasion.

For 5 weeks, Rongstad positioned her life on the again burner. From Monday by means of Saturday, she labored at the least 10 and generally greater than 12 hours; on a number of events, she labored Sunday as properly. Unable to search out the time to go to the grocery retailer or cook dinner, she subsisted on takeout.

Then, on Dec. 3, almost a 3rd of her division was laid off.

Gathering to assist each other, Rongstad and her colleagues cried, commiserated and talked over their scenario. Regularly, they got here to a consensus: It was time to go on strike.

The next Monday, greater than 60 of Raven’s QA testers stopped work. A number of weeks later, they kicked off 2022 with a vote to unionize.

We “realized that if we got here collectively and demonstrated that our division isn’t disposable and that the individuals right here aren’t disposable, that we’d have a chance to undo what was executed,” Rongstad mentioned.

For many years, employees within the online game trade have endured situations like those that preceded Rongstad’s layoff. Generally known as “crunch,” the brutal stretch main as much as a sport’s launch is an trade ceremony of passage. Staff have described working as many as 20 hours a day, sleeping at their workplaces and scarcely seeing their households — all with out getting paid extra time.

However currently, a rising phase of the trade’s workforce has made it clear they’re not prepared to abide by the established order. In a bid to vary it, they’ve begun taking on the normal instruments of labor organizing, together with petitions, walkouts and full-blown unionization.

To the extent these developments signify a motion, it’s one in its infancy. However even a small shift of energy into the fingers of employees could be historic for an $85-billion trade that has lengthy relied on contract labor and exploitative practices. And the situations for it to occur are more and more favorable, some gaming observers say.

“We’ve bought a confluence of occasions and elements that make it attainable for this to occur now which can be perhaps completely different than 10 years in the past,” mentioned Dmitri Williams, a USC professor who researches know-how and society. “It’s not a slam dunk. However between the numerous labor points which were within the press and those which have at all times been within the trade, there’s at all times been a necessity and want for the employees to have extra energy relative to administration.”

An trade in turmoil

The online game trade’s labor awakening has roots within the #MeToo motion of 2018. As girls in leisure and different professions spoke up about their abusers, staff at Riot Video games, developer of “League of Legends,” painted an image of a office rife with sexism and harassment. Within the following months, equal pay and gender discrimination lawsuits have been filed.

In mid-2020, Ubisoft, the French firm chargeable for hits together with “Assassins Creed” and “Simply Dance,” drew consideration when staff got here ahead with allegations of abuse at its studios throughout the globe. A number of high executives stepped down, and the corporate vowed to do higher.

At Activision Blizzard, which developed “Overwatch” and “Diablo,” a flurry of reports experiences within the latter half of 2021 detailed allegations of sexual misconduct and discrimination that led to a number of employee walkouts, together with one demanding the resignation of Chief Government Bobby Kotick, whom the Wall Road Journal reported was conscious of however didn’t report back to the board a number of alleged sexual misconduct incidents, together with an alleged rape. Activision’s woes have been reportedly an element within the firm’s choice to simply accept a $68.7-billion acquisition provide from Microsoft in January.

This month, the dad and mom of an Activision Blizzard worker who took her personal life throughout a piece retreat filed a lawsuit towards the corporate alleging wrongful dying and sexual harassment.

“It’s been within the public consciousness so lengthy that folks can’t simply fake it’s a one- or two-studio downside,” mentioned Stephen, a member of Recreation Staff of Southern California who declined to supply his final identify out of worry of retaliation from his employer. “All people is aware of now.”

As in different inventive fields, the need of many employees to be concerned in making the merchandise they love has lengthy performed an element of their exploitation, with studios in a position to fill jobs regardless of low pay and little safety.

However the pandemic altered that dynamic, inflicting employees of all stripes to query their working situations as the worldwide well being disaster took its toll on essentially the most susceptible segments in society. Because the economic system rebounded, a widespread labor scarcity offered the leverage to start pushing again.

“Now we have a reasonably tight labor market proper now and low unemployment,” mentioned Jessie Hammerling, a researcher on the UC Berkeley Labor Middle. “And I feel that helps give employees higher confidence to face up.”

She pointed to a wave of high-profile strikes and union drives within the final 12 months, at firms together with Starbucks, Amazon, REI and John Deere.

An annual survey carried out by the Worldwide Recreation Builders Assn., an trade group fashioned within the Nineteen Nineties, has discovered curiosity in unionization surging. In 2009, the survey discovered solely a 3rd of sport employees would assist a union at their firm. In 2019, that quantity was 47%, and by 2021, it had climbed to 78% in favor of unions and simply 9% towards them.

It’s an extended and winding path to precise unionization, nonetheless. “Union is like, one of many final steps on a really lengthy combat,” Stephen mentioned.

An offshoot of Recreation Staff Unite, a employees’ advocacy group that fashioned in 2018, Recreation Staff of Southern California primarily helps employees entry the assets they should set up or facilitate conversations about office abuse and employees’ rights. It has about 160 members at 25 studios within the Los Angeles space.

Within the final three years, ad-hoc employee organizing teams have fashioned at a number of main studios, with the checklist now together with A Higher ABK (Activision Blizzard King), A Higher Ubisoft and Rioters for Change.

North America noticed its first online game union type on the finish of 2021 at Vodeo Video games, an indie studio of a couple of dozen staff. Regardless of its small measurement and comparatively worker-friendly practices — together with four-day workweeks and limitless trip days — producer Myriame Lachapelle, who helped set up her office, mentioned she believes all employees deserve a union.

“We love working at Vodeo Video games, and we would like the studio to succeed and be the most effective it may probably be,” Lachapelle mentioned, “which is why we imagine it’s very important for us as employees to have a seat on the desk.”

However to date, Vodeo is an anomaly.

Activision Blizzard didn’t voluntarily acknowledge the union fashioned by the Raven QA testers, forcing employees to file a petition with the Nationwide Labor Relations Board, which may ultimately facilitate a union election. The NLRB listening to on the petition started final month.

Activision Blizzard mentioned its discussions with the group searching for union standing didn’t produce a “mutually acceptable answer” that will have led to instant recognition.

“We imagine that every one Raven Studio staff ought to have a chance to vote and have their voice heard,” an organization spokesperson mentioned in an announcement, showing to point the corporate would push for a full studio vote slightly than permitting a union to type in only one division.

The corporate additionally pointed to adjustments during the last couple of years, together with elevating minimal compensation for Raven QA staff by 41% and transitioning greater than 60% of short-term workers into full-time staff.

Arguments towards unions in inventive sectors contact upon issues about innovation, flexibility, particular person compensation and results on the underside line.

“A union doesn’t do something to assist us produce world-class video games, and the bargaining course of isn’t usually fast, typically reduces flexibility, and may be adversarial and result in destructive publicity,” Christian Arends, vice chairman of high quality assurance, mentioned in a screenshot of an organization Slack message posted on social media after the Raven unionizing information. “All of this might harm our capability to proceed creating nice video games.”

Gaming’s underclass

QA testers bear the brunt of cost-cutting measures at sport studios, working among the worst crunch hours — typically with out the advantages of being full-time staff — and incomes a mean of about $50,000 a 12 months nationally, in accordance with Glassdoor. They’re chargeable for making an attempt out each attainable method a participant may work together with a brand new launch or sport function to catch bugs earlier than gamers encounter them throughout gameplay.

One QA employee organizer with A Higher ABK, who requested to stay nameless as a consequence of being a short lived worker, mentioned she skilled routine 12-to-14-hour days with solely someday off each few weeks. As a fixed-term contract worker, she should regularly reapply for brand new positions inside the firm each time her contracts finish.

Rongstad described the crunch intervals of her life as traumatic, saying she and lots of of her colleagues “don’t have reminiscences from that point as a result of all we did was work.”

When Raven QA testers walked off the job, A Higher ABK created a strike fund that accepted greater than $200,000 in its first day and handed out union authorization playing cards for workers to signal. Extra lately, with the destiny of their union nonetheless up within the air, Rongstad and her remaining co-workers have resumed work.

In the long run, labor organizers within the gaming trade see the leisure enterprise as a mannequin for what’s attainable.

Hollywood employees additionally took many years to arrange, and there are nonetheless pockets which can be nonunion, similar to visible results employees, mentioned Emma Kinema, an organizer for Communications Staff of America. Although the earliest recorded union in Hollywood was acknowledged in 1926, it wasn’t till the Nineteen Forties and ‘50s that they took root within the trade.

The rise in organizing exercise within the online game trade could also be a part of the pure maturation of a comparatively younger trade.

“The sport trade is way youthful,” Williams mentioned. “It actually solely began in earnest within the late ‘70s, early ‘80s.… And the sport trade solely grew to become a big company trade over just like the final 30 years actually. And solely within the final 10, 20 years did it get tremendous huge” — greater than films and sports activities mixed, in accordance with one evaluation.

Online game employees on the opposite aspect of the world are organizing too. In the UK, any employee can be a part of the Impartial Staff Union of Nice Britain’s Recreation Staff Unite department, which launched in 2018. South Korean on-line gaming firm Nexon Korea fashioned a union in 2018, and Paradox Interactive in Sweden signed a collective bargaining settlement with two labor unions in mid-2020.

As organizers study from profitable and failed campaigns — at online game studios, and likewise within the tech sector, the place comparable efforts are underway at Google and different firms — they’ll show more and more efficient, Kinema predicted.

She described a employee who was a part of an unsuccessful union drive at Mapbox, a location knowledge startup in Silicon Valley, who then went on to assist employees unionize at tabletop sport writer Paizo.

“That’s the purpose of organizing at an industrywide stage as a result of, you recognize, whether or not the fights are smaller or huge, they’re all related.”

Business

Religious Leaders Experiment with A.I. in Sermons

Published

6 hours ago

January 3, 2025

Press Room

Religious Leaders Experiment with A.I. in Sermons

To members of his synagogue, the voice that played over the speakers of Congregation Emanu El in Houston sounded just like Rabbi Josh Fixler’s.

In the same steady rhythm his congregation had grown used to, the voice delivered a sermon about what it meant to be a neighbor in the age of artificial intelligence. Then, Rabbi Fixler took to the bimah himself.

“The audio you heard a moment ago may have sounded like my words,” he said. “But they weren’t.”

The recording was created by what Rabbi Fixler called “Rabbi Bot,” an A.I. chatbot trained on his old sermons. The chatbot, created with the help of a data scientist, wrote the sermon, even delivering it in an A.I. version of his voice. During the rest of the service, Rabbi Fixler intermittently asked Rabbi Bot questions aloud, which it would promptly answer.

Rabbi Fixler is among a growing number of religious leaders experimenting with A.I. in their work, spurring an industry of faith-based tech companies that offer A.I. tools, from assistants that can do theological research to chatbots that can help write sermons.

For centuries, new technologies have changed the ways people worship, from the radio in the 1920s to television sets in the 1950s and the internet in the 1990s. Some proponents of A.I. in religious spaces have gone back even further, comparing A.I.’s potential — and fears of it — to the invention of the printing press in the 15th century.

Religious leaders have used A.I. to translate their livestreamed sermons into different languages in real time, blasting them out to international audiences. Others have compared chatbots trained on tens of thousands of pages of Scripture to a fleet of newly trained seminary students, able to pull excerpts about certain topics nearly instantaneously.

But the ethical questions around using generative A.I. for religious tasks have become more complicated as the technology has improved, religious leaders say. While most agree that using A.I. for tasks like research or marketing is acceptable, other uses for the technology, like sermon writing, are seen by some as a step too far.

Jay Cooper, a pastor in Austin, Texas, used OpenAI’s ChatGPT to generate an entire service for his church as an experiment in 2023. He marketed it using posters of robots, and the service drew in some curious new attendees — “gamer types,” Mr. Cooper said — who had never before been to his congregation.

The thematic prompt he gave ChatGPT to generate various parts of the service was: “How can we recognize truth in a world where A.I. blurs the truth?” ChatGPT came up with a welcome message, a sermon, a children’s program and even a four-verse song, which was the biggest hit of the bunch, Mr. Cooper said. The song went:

As algorithms spin webs of lies
We lift our gaze to the endless skies
Where Christ’s teachings illuminate our way
Dispelling falsehoods with the light of day

Mr. Cooper has not since used the technology to help write sermons, preferring to draw instead from his own experiences. But the presence of A.I. in faith-based spaces, he said, poses a larger question: Can God speak through A.I.?

“That’s a question a lot of Christians online do not like at all because it brings up some fear,” Mr. Cooper said. “It may be for good reason. But I think it’s a worthy question.”

The impact of A.I. on religion and ethics has been a touch point for Pope Francis on several occasions, though he has not directly addressed using A.I. to help write sermons.

Our humanity “enables us to look at things with God’s eyes, to see connections, situations, events and to uncover their real meaning,” the pope said in a message early last year. “Without this kind of wisdom, life becomes bland.”

He added, “Such wisdom cannot be sought from machines.”

Phil EuBank, a pastor at Menlo Church in Menlo Park, Calif., compared A.I. to a “bionic arm” that could supercharge his work. But when it comes to sermon writing, “there’s that Uncanny Valley territory,” he said, “where it may get you really close, but really close can be really weird.”

Rabbi Fixler agreed. He recalled being taken aback when Rabbi Bot asked him to include in his A.I. sermon, a one-time experiment, a line about itself.

“Just as the Torah instructs us to love our neighbors as ourselves,” Rabbi Bot said, “can we also extend this love and empathy to the A.I. entities we create?”

Rabbis have historically been early adopters of new technologies, especially for printed books in the 15th century. But the divinity of those books was in the spiritual relationship that their readers had with God, said Rabbi Oren Hayon, who is also a part of Congregation Emanu El.

To assist his research, Rabbi Hayon regularly uses a custom chatbot trained on 20 years of his own writings. But he has never used A.I. to write portions of sermons.

“Our job is not just to put pretty sentences together,” Rabbi Hayon said. “It’s to hopefully write something that’s lyrical and moving and articulate, but also responds to the uniquely human hungers and pains and losses that we’re aware of because we are in human communities with other people.” He added, “It can’t be automated.”

Kenny Jahng, a tech entrepreneur, believes that fears about ministers’ using generative A.I. are overblown, and that leaning into the technology may even be necessary to appeal to a new generation of young, tech-savvy churchgoers when church attendance across the country is in decline.

Mr. Jahng, the editor in chief of a faith- and tech-focused media company and founder of an A.I. education platform, has traveled the country in the last year to speak at conferences and promote faith-based A.I. products. He also runs a Facebook group for tech-curious church leaders with over 6,000 members.

“We are looking at data that the spiritually curious in Gen Alpha, Gen Z are much higher than boomers and Gen X-ers that have left the church since Covid,” Mr. Jahng said. “It’s this perfect storm.”

As of now, a majority of faith-based A.I. companies cater to Christians and Jews, but custom chatbots for Muslims and Buddhists exist as well.

Some churches have already started to subtly infuse their services and websites with A.I.

The chatbot on the website of the Father’s House, a church in Leesburg, Fla., for instance, appears to offer standard customer service. Among its recommended questions: “What time are your services?”

The next suggestion is more complex.

“Why are my prayers not answered?”

The chatbot was created by Pastors.ai, a start-up founded by Joe Suh, a tech entrepreneur and attendee of Mr. EuBank’s church in Silicon Valley.

After one of Mr. Suh’s longtime pastors left his church, he had the idea of uploading recordings of that pastor’s sermons to ChatGPT. Mr. Suh would then ask the chatbot intimate questions about his faith. He turned the concept into a business.

Mr. Suh’s chatbots are trained on archives of a church’s sermons and information from its website. But around 95 percent of the people who use the chatbots ask them questions about things like service times rather than probing deep into their spirituality, Mr. Suh said.

“I think that will eventually change, but for now, that concept might be a little bit ahead of its time,” he added.

Critics of A.I. use by religious leaders have pointed to the issue of hallucinations — times when chatbots make stuff up. While harmless in certain situations, faith-based A.I. tools that fabricate religious scripture present a serious problem. In Rabbi Bot’s sermon, for instance, the A.I. invented a quote from the Jewish philosopher Maimonides that would have passed as authentic to the casual listener.

For other religious leaders, the issue of A.I. is a simpler one: How can sermon writers hone their craft without doing it entirely themselves?

“I worry for pastors, in some ways, that it won’t help them stretch their sermon writing muscles, which is where I think so much of our great theology and great sermons come from, years and years of preaching,” said Thomas Costello, a pastor at New Hope Hawaii Kai in Honolulu.

On a recent afternoon at his synagogue, Rabbi Hayon recalled taking a picture of his bookshelf and asking his A.I. assistant which of the books he had not quoted in his recent sermons. Before A.I., he would have pulled down the titles themselves, taking the time to read through their indexes, carefully checking them against his own work.

“I was a little sad to miss that part of the process that is so fruitful and so joyful and rich and enlightening, that gives fuel to the life of the Spirit,” Rabbi Hayon said. “Using A.I. does get you to an answer quicker, but you’ve certainly lost something along the way.”

Business

Opinion: Recent strikes show the crisis in Americans' working lives

Published

8 hours ago

January 3, 2025

Press Room

Opinion: Recent strikes show the crisis in Americans' working lives

Chances are slim that the dual strikes at Starbucks stores and Amazon warehouses around the country disrupted your holiday season. By most accounts, packages arrived on schedule, while consumers jonesing for Iced Brown Sugar Oat Milk Shaken Espressos almost certainly managed to find sugar and succor elsewhere. Still, the issues at the heart of the strikes offer a way into understanding how fundamentally broken the terms of work are in the United States.

Whether you log shifts behind a counter, work a classroom or factory floor or sit at a desk, the current battles over opportunity have not only ensnared more Americans than ever, but have undercut the social mobility that was once essential to America’s concept of itself.

In 2023, an economic opportunity poll by Gallup found that 39% of Americans believed that they were failing to get ahead despite working hard. That figure in 2002: 23%. The failure of hard work to pay off in America makes our communities wobbly, our faith weak, our lives lonely, our politics toxic and our relationship with work masochistic and unsustainable.

In lobbying for a higher quality of life, for example, one of the top grievances raised by striking Starbucks workers was unpredictable scheduling, a popular practice in which employers don’t set worker schedules more than a few days (or even hours) in advance. “Employees in lower-wage industries are increasingly at the mercy of scheduling algorithms designed to maximize efficiency and minimize labor costs,” Rebecca Plevin noted last year. “When staffing doesn’t match expected customer demand, workers might be called in at the last minute or sent home early.” Anyone with email on their phone knows how work can bleed into off-hours, but for those working second or third jobs, enrolled in training, college or certification courses, providing steady childcare or simply hoping to spend time with family or friends, a lack of predictable hours makes the basic patterns of life erratic.

Problems like these tend to compound quickly. Although some cities, like Los Angeles, have passed predictive scheduling ordinances, that hasn’t solved the problem of workers not knowing how much income they’ll bring in each month. Known as income volatility, the phenomenon of fluctuating paychecks and family incomes has become at least twice as common since 1970 and now affects roughly a third of U.S. households.

Set off in part by the rise of gig work, “perma-lancing” and jobs without a set number of hours, the unreliable nature of wages has all kinds of consequences beyond sending families scrambling to adjust when the bottom of their budget falls out. “I have to beg my manager to ensure I’m scheduled for at least 20 hours of work a week,” Arloa Fluhr, a Starbucks barista in Illinois, wrote of her decision to strike last month. “If I don’t meet those 20 hours every week, I could lose my benefits and the health insurance I rely on to care for my three children, including my 10-year-old daughter, who has type 1 diabetes.”

Beyond the financial stress, unstable wages can make it impossible to save money, make long-term plans and get access to credit. A family with unpredictable earnings might qualify for public assistance one month and then breach the income threshold and be disqualified another. “Families close to the eligibility threshold for food stamps who had more volatile incomes were less likely to utilize this benefit in the years that they qualified for it,” a 2022 report from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis found, adding that nearly 1 in 5 eligible families don’t sign up for food stamps (formally known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program).

And while many of the quality-of-life issues may sound academic or abstract, they manifest in fundamental problems of the everyday and in a degradation of experience for everyone, everywhere. Complaints of chronic employee overwork and understaffing aren’t limited to fulfillment centers, chain coffee shops or fast-food restaurants, but also are pervasive at hospitals, schools and air traffic control facilities. For obvious reasons, a staff retention problem at the Secret Service captured headlines last year. One recent workforce survey found that roughly half of all U.S. workers said their workplaces are understaffed, with 43% of workers considering leaving their jobs.

Ultimately, the shortcomings of our work standards hurt everyone, including executives focused on the bottom line. Using data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Gallup put a conservative price tag of a staggering $1 trillion on the replacement cost of employees who voluntarily leave their jobs in the United States each year. Including factors such as low morale and lost worker knowledge, lower productivity and recruitment and training expenses, it estimated that the “cost of replacing an individual employee can range from one-half to two times the employee’s annual salary.”

The context for the Amazon warehouse strikes highlights the absurdity of this dynamic. According to internal company documents made public in 2022, Amazon suffers from a 150% worker-attrition rate annually, roughly double the industry average. In simpler terms, only one out of every three workers hired by Amazon in 2021 managed to stay with the company for more than three months. This level of workforce bleed cost the e-commerce giant a mind-boggling $8 billion in profits. In addition to showing that twice as many workers were leaving voluntarily as would be expected, the documents also highlighted worries that the company might run out of potential hires in certain markets because it had cycled through so much of the workforce.

This brings us back to the strikes. Depending on where you live, the appearance of worker-led protests and work stoppages may seem like constant fixtures of the landscape. They’re not. Despite union visibility and record-high popularity in the U.S., membership in unions currently hovers at an all-time low. With more meaningful protections against wage theft or basic benefits like paid sick leave, guaranteed time off and affordable healthcare elusive, businesses largely maintain the power to dictate the terms of work culture in the United States. And as we’re all seeing, they’re doing a terrible job.

Adam Chandler is the author of “Drive-Thru Dreams” and the forthcoming “99% Perspiration: A New Working History of the American Way of Life,” from which this article is adapted.

Business

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

Published

16 hours ago

January 3, 2025

Press Room

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.