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captive audience
Idioms and Phrases
Listeners or onlookers who have no choice but to attend. For example, It's a required course and, knowing he has a captive audience, the professor rambles on endlessly . This expression, first recorded in 1902, uses captive in the sense of âunable to escape.âExample Sentences
Last November, Wilcox and a majority of the board voted to bar Amazon from holding mandatory "captive audience meetings" designed to threaten or persuade voters against forming a union.
Trump is rarely a captive audience; Budde courageously seized the opportunity to demonstrate what true spiritual leadership looks like.
A 2009 study of 1,004 NLRB-supervised union representation elections cited in its ruling found that captive audience meetings had been held in 89% of cases; more than half of the employers had held more than five âin the runup to an election.â
The board noted that the 1948 finding that captive audience meetings didnât violate labor law was âlargely unexplainedâ and âflawedâ under the law.
Unions have long held that these âcaptive audience meetingsâ serve to intimidate employees and hinder organizing efforts.
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Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American HeritageŸ Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
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