Employees attempting to organize the first union at an Apple store filed a ULP charge on Tuesday alleging that the company ran afoul of the Act by holding captive audience meetings. While lawful under extant Board law, General Counsel Abruzzo has described such meetings as an impermissible “license to coerce” and urged the Board to proscribe them. Last month employees at this Atlanta location became the first group to petition for a union election at an Apple facility, which prompted several other stores to follow suit in recent weeks.

On Tuesday the AFA-CWA offered its “full support” to the proposed merger between Spirit Airlines and Frontier Airlines, two dominant ultra low-cost carriers, significantly bolstering the possibility the multibillion dollar deal will come to fruition.

In exchange for its endorsement, the union, which represents both companies’ flight attendants, extracted a series of concessions to protect its members — i.e., that the merger will not be finalized until a joint collective bargaining agreement has been ratified, will not result in any furloughs, and will not disturb seniority. The union’s backing does not guarantee success, however, as an expanding bipartisan coalition of lawmakers has signaled skepticism of the proposal, and its anticompetitive effects are subject to scrutiny by the FTC.

In NLRB news, Angie Cowan Hamada, an attorney with the Chicago-based labor firm Allison, Slutsky, & Kennedy, was appointed regional director of Region 13. Ms. Cowan Hamada, “a brilliant labor lawyer who has dedicated her career to protecting workers’ rights,” in the words of General Counsel Abruzzo, worked for a union before law school, was a Peggy Browning Fellow in law school, and has almost exclusively represented unions and workers in her professional career.