[It’s not enough for Starbucks to carry out a scorched-earth
campaign to destroy workers’ union organizing campaign. The company
is now implementing Trump-like attacks on the legitimacy of union
elections overseen by the National Labor Relations Board. ]
[[link removed]]

STARBUCKS’S LATEST UNION-BUSTING TACTIC: DEMAND THE SUSPENSION OF
NLRB ELECTIONS NATIONWIDE  
[[link removed]]


 

John Logan
August 16, 2022
Jacobin
[[link removed]]


*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

_ It’s not enough for Starbucks to carry out a scorched-earth
campaign to destroy workers’ union organizing campaign. The company
is now implementing Trump-like attacks on the legitimacy of union
elections overseen by the National Labor Relations Board. _

Starbucks's new union-busting strategy is to halt NLRB elections
across the country., @uchiuska / Flickr

 

After engaging in one of the most brutal and most unlawful anti-union
campaigns of recent decades, Starbucks has hit on a new tactic: it is
claiming evidence of skullduggery at the National Labor Relations
Board (NLRB) in order to help pro-union workers win an election in
Kansas City. As a result, the company is calling for mail-in
certification elections at the company to be suspended with immediate
effect.

In a letter
[[link removed]]
to the NLRB, Starbucks says that Board agents in Kansas City favored
pro-union workers in the election process and then colluded with the
union, Workers United, to hide the evidence of malfeasance. In
response, Workers United said the letter was simply Starbucks’s
“latest attempt to manipulate the legal process for their own means
and prevent workers from exercising their fundamental right to
organize.” So far, the union has won over two hundred twenty NLRB
elections in thirty-three states — many by overwhelming margins —
and has lost only forty-six elections.

Starbucks is scraping the bottom of the barrel here — and forgot to
mention its unlawful termination of three workers at the same
location. The Board is accorded a lot of discretion to manage
elections. It’s highly unlikely that the Board will find any
substance in its complaint. So often with Starbucks, the complaint (or
the appeal) is the point. It does not seem like a good issue for them;
if there was something better they would use it, but this is the best
they’ve got.

My understanding is that the Kansas City issue involves a few
Starbucks workers who did not received their ballots — even after
requesting them from the NLRB — and then asked if they could cast
their ballots at the local NLRB office, which was a seven-minute walk
from the Starbucks store, and were told that they could do so. Nothing
more sinister than that.

Almost laughably, Starbucks’s letter is complaining
[[link removed]]
about election conduct at a store — Overland Park, Kansas — at
which the NLRB has already found merit in a complaint that Starbucks
unlawfully fired three employees, out of an estimated seventy-five
nationwide terminated
[[link removed]]
for union activity.

Most cases involving accusations of Board agent misconduct involve
Board agent conduct during in-person elections: for example, an
employer complains that an agent left the polling area to go to the
bathroom or let union supporters wear buttons in polling area.
Amazon’s case
[[link removed]]
against the election result at JKF8 warehouse in Staten Island
involves a complaint against both the Amazon Labor Union and the NLRB
office in Brooklyn.

Such employer cases are typically filed as objections and are
litigated in an objections hearing presided over by a Board agent or
hearing officer from a different NLRB region from the region in which
the alleged conduct took place. These hearings are similar to other
board hearings, except that it’s more complicated to call a Board
agent as a witness. In the Starbucks campaign, Board agents across the
country — who are career civil servants — have been conducting
hundreds of representation elections, and investigating hundreds of
unlawful anti-union practices, with extremely limited staff and other
resources
[[link removed]].
Starbucks’s endless, frivolous appeals, objections, and complaints
makes their job more difficult — and means they have less time to
devote to election and unfair labor practice proceedings. This is the
point.

Assuming “something” happened in this case — rather than every
detail of Starbucks’s complaint being a fabrication — it likely
did not change the outcome of the election. Starbucks is almost
suggesting that simply because these elections are run by the federal
government, they must be politically motivated and corrupt.

Starbucks’s letter to the Board states that if it fails to properly
investigate and suspend elections pending the outcome of the
investigation, “we do not see how the Board can represent itself as
a neutral agency adjudicating unfair labor practice (ULP) disputes —
and elections — in a manner that is fair, honest, and proper,
without the appearance of impropriety.”

The Board will almost certainly do some kind of investigation —
likely conducted by the regional director and then the full Board —
which would likely find very little. But it gives Starbucks a talking
point, allows the company to take the moral high ground, and perhaps
provides something it can hope to use down the road with the federal
courts. It allows Starbucks to delay and helps it to sow distrust
about the NLRB process, and maybe scare off even more workers from
becoming involved in the process.

Delay is the point here — Starbucks can win, even when it loses. The
bar is extremely low when it comes to this kind of complaint, but
winning isn’t even necessarily their aim. Even if Starbucks loses
before the Board, that doesn’t mean it loses. The complaint delays
workers’ efforts to organize, it delays elections, and it delays
bargaining. From the company’s perspective, that’s great.

Starbucks is correct about one thing: the NLRB’s elections at the
company are unfair.

But Starbucks may try to appeal to the federal court, whose judges are
often largely uninformed about how the nuts and bolts of NLRB
elections work, and thus Starbucks might feel that it has a shot
before the court if its complaints get that far.

Starbucks has repeatedly filed objections to elections that have been
rejected by the NLRB. It has repeatedly complained about single-store
bargaining and pushed for multistore units. These appeals have been
rejected. Starbucks has repeatedly complained about mail-in ballots in
several regions. These complaints, too, have been rejected.

It is now complaining that the election at the landmark Seattle
Roastery (where it lost in an election in April) should be overturned
because only about two-thirds of the workers voted with the mail-in
ballot. The Board will almost certainly reject this baseless appeal,
but Starbucks gets to delay bargaining with the employees for months
as a result. Last week, its complaint at workers’ conduct during an
election campaign in Phoenix was rejected
[[link removed]]
outright by the NLRB.

By filing a complaint against the NLRB, Starbucks may simply be trying
to divert attention from its own unlawful conduct.

The NLRB currently has 284 open ULP charges, spread across
twenty-eight states, against Starbucks. Most anti-union corporations
would take years to rack up this number of complaints. Regional
offices have already filed nineteen complaints against Starbucks
covering eighty-one ULP cases. Seven of these cases are currently
before Administrative Law Judges (ALJ), and ten are awaiting a hearing
before an ALJ (meaning that the regional Board has already found merit
in all of these complaints). In Buffalo alone, the NLRB regional
director found that Starbucks committed almost three hundred
violations of federal labor law during its brutal four-month-long
campaign against pro-union workers.

Most importantly, the Board must still rule on Starbucks’s most
serious unlawful anti-union action: for the past three to four months,
the company has been telling workers
[[link removed]]
it will raise wages and benefits. The company then implemented the
increases on August 1, but only for workers who were not involved in
organizing and who had not voted to unionize.
This threat has been repeated at every store in the country and has
had a profoundly negative effect on the number of new stores
petitioning to unionize. In an interview with Steven Greenhouse in
the_ Guardian_,
[[link removed]]
NLRB general counsel Jennifer Abruzzo — the Board’s top lawyer —
stated she viewed such a threat as unlawful coercion. Asked about such
a threat in general terms, Abruzzo responded: “I think saying that
is an unfair labor practice. . . . To me that statement is inherently
discriminatory conduct.”

Starbucks NLRB Elections Are Unfair
Starbucks is correct about one thing: the NLRB’s elections at the
company are unfair.

They are unfair because Starbucks has fired
[[link removed]]
over seventy-five pro-union activists. They are unfair because
Starbucks has denied
[[link removed]]
wage and benefit increases to workers at stores involved in organizing
activities. They are unfair because Starbucks has closed
[[link removed]]
pro-union stores in Buffalo, Ithaca, Seattle, Portland, and elsewhere.

And they are unfair because Starbucks and its union avoidance law
firm, Littler Mendelson
[[link removed]],
have made it their mission to make it impossible
[[link removed]]
to hold a fair election at any of Starbucks’s almost nine thousand
corporate-owned coffee stores throughout the country.

By taking these actions, and now by questioning the legitimacy
[[link removed]]
of the NLRB’s processes, Starbucks is further weakening
[[link removed]]
democratic norms and institutions in the country at a time of national
crisis.

===

* Starbucks and the NLRB; Union Elections; Starbucks Union Busting;
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web
[[link removed]]

Submit via email
Frequently asked questions
[[link removed]]

Manage subscription
[[link removed]]

Visit xxxxxx.org
[[link removed]]

Twitter [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 




[link removed]

To unsubscribe, click the following link:
[link removed]