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    Starbucks Union Raises Pressure With Plan to Strike Over Pride Décor

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    Walkouts were called at more than 150 stores in the next week after workers said Pride Month decorations had been banned in some, a claim the company denied.Thousands of workers at organized Starbucks stores across the nation will stage strikes over the next week, their union said on Friday, after workers in some states said management prohibited them from putting up decorations for Pride Month.The company denied the accusations and issued a statement declaring that it “has been and will continue to be at the forefront of supporting the LGBTQIA2+ community.”Starbucks Workers United said employees at more than 150 stores would strike over the company’s labor practices and its “hypocritical treatment of LGBTQIA+ workers.”The union represents about 8,000 of the company’s workers in more than 300 stores.Starbucks workers in a number of stores said this month that they had been told that no decorations for the annual L.G.B.T.Q. celebration, such as rainbow flags, were allowed this year, a shift from previous years. In interviews arranged through their union, workers said the given reasons varied.Starbucks, which has roughly 9,300 corporate-owned stores in the United States, has said decoration policies are often specific to each store.A Starbucks official involved in the response to the union campaign said the company decided last year, after the union campaign began to spread across the country, to be more aggressive in enforcing dress codes and policies on what could be posted in stores. The official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, attributed the change to concern that many stores would otherwise become inundated with union paraphernalia.But a Starbucks spokeswoman on Friday called the claim “false” and said there had been no change in the company’s guidance on displays and decorations in the past nine years.A corporate statement — over the names of Laxman Narasimhan, the chief executive, and Sara Trilling, executive vice president and president, North America — did not address store-by-store practices. But it noted that for Pride Month, the rainbow flag was being flown over the company’s Seattle headquarters and in thousands of Starbucks stores.“We continue to encourage our store leaders to celebrate with their communities including for U.S. Pride Month in June,” it said.Casey Moore, a union spokeswoman, derided the corporate statement, saying, “Instead of apologizing for there being upper management across the country who made the decision to not allow Pride decorations, they’ve doubled down that it didn’t happen.”In addition to its complaints over the Pride decoration issue, the union said it was striking over the company’s broader response to the organizing campaign, including widespread retaliation against union supporters. The union said in its statement that workers were “demanding that Starbucks negotiate a fair contract with union stores and stop their illegal union-busting campaign.”The company has consistently denied accusations of illegality.Starbucks workers and the union say rules on employee conduct have been enforced more aggressively as a way to intimidate and retaliate against union supporters.“They’re trying to make people feel unwelcome in whatever way possible — through more strict enforcement of the dress code or anything,” said Ms. Moore, the union spokeswoman. “The Pride decorations are another level of that.”In a sweeping ruling in March, a federal administrative law judge found that Starbucks had repeatedly violated labor law by “more strictly enforcing the dress code and personal appearance policy in response to union activity.” The judge also found that the company had more strictly enforced its attendance policy and its policy on soliciting and distributing notices within stores.Starbucks has disputed the findings and is appealing the decision to the National Labor Relations Board in Washington.Unionized Starbucks workers have staged waves of strikes in the last several months over what they say are the company’s delay tactics at the bargaining table and other anti-union tactics like retaliatory firings and store closings. The administrative judge’s ruling in March also found that Starbucks had illegally dismissed seven Buffalo-area workers last year in response to union activity.In April, the labor board issued a complaint accusing the company of failing to bargain in good faith at more than 100 stores. It was one of dozens of complaints tied to labor law violations that the board has issued since the union first filed petitions seeking votes in three Buffalo-area stores in August 2021.The company has denied the accusations and blames the union for bargaining delays, citing the union’s insistence on using video-chat software to broadcast sessions to employees not at the bargaining table.Howard Schultz, shortly after stepping down as Starbucks’ chief executive in March, denied allegations of anti-union conduct in testimony before a Senate committee. More

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    Remote Work Gives Amazon Workers a Common Cause

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    At Amazon, warehouse workers have shown support for corporate colleagues, noting they have nothing to gain if office workers lose flexibility that the pandemic proved possible.Eric Deshawn Lerma felt waves of anxiety when he sat down to tally the new costs in his routine since Amazon’s return to the office this spring. There’s parking. There’s fuel. There’s lunch. They add up to at least $200 extra a month, all to support a policy whose justification he can’t fully understand — after three years in which he and his teammates have been doing their jobs from home.Still, when Mr. Lerma heard that some of his colleagues were organizing a walkout to protest the return-to-office policy, which asks employees to come in at least three days a week, he initially wavered on whether to participate. After all, he realizes that thousands of Amazon workers have no flexibility to work from home. Their jobs require them to go into warehouses to do physically taxing labor each day.“It really provided me with a sense of internal conflict about working from home being a luxury or a right,” said Mr. Lerma, 27, who is an executive assistant in Seattle and joined the company, where he feels he has grown personally and professionally, in 2022. “There are different rights and amenities afforded to my role.”He ultimately decided, though, that he would probably join virtually. “While warehouse workers have much harsher working conditions than I do,” he said, “I should still be able to reserve the right to protect my autonomy as an employee.”Thousands of corporate employees, across industries, who remain adamant that they do not want to return to the office are now confronting a tension: How do their demands compare with those of the millions of workers whose jobs have never permitted them the ease of remote work? And can a corporate employee’s advocacy be of use to workers, including those trying to unionize, outside the corporate sphere?This tension follows a pandemic that exacerbated the divide between white-collar workers who could do their jobs from the safety of their homes and workers who often could not and were exposed to higher Covid risks.Simultaneously, workers in both the corporate and noncorporate realms have re-evaluated their working conditions, quit their jobs in waves and called for higher wages, amid a tight labor market at one point called a “workers economy.” The unemployment rate this spring has remained low, at 3.4 percent, with wages rising.Most Amazon workers have been working at company facilities throughout the pandemic.Hiroko Masuike/The New York TimesAt Amazon, hundreds of corporate employees plan to walk off the job on Wednesday, for one hour during lunchtime, in protest of the company’s return-to-office rule, among other issues including layoffs and the company’s impact on the climate. Weeks earlier, employees voiced their frustrations with the R.T.O. policy in a Remote Advocacy channel, with over 30,000 members, on the Slack workplace messaging system.The company has more than 350,000 corporate and tech employees globally. More than 800 in Seattle and 1,600 globally have pledged to participate in the walkout. Some employees, particularly working parents, pin some of their frustration to the financial toll of returning to the office, especially the cost and pressures of child care.The vast majority of Amazon’s more than one million workers, including those who formed a union at a Staten Island warehouse, have been working in person throughout the pandemic.Apple, where employees issued open letters protesting in-person work, and at the Gap have encountered a similar dynamic. At Starbucks, more than 70 named employees, along with others who remained anonymous, released a petition this year urging the company to permit them to keep working remotely. Members of the union representing Starbucks baristas have been supportive of these corporate workers, even though most of the company’s roughly 250,000 U.S. employees, including those across more than 300 unionized stores, cannot work from home.Indeed, many workers in warehouses and stores have been quick to show support for their corporate colleagues, noting that they have nothing to gain from seeing office workers lose out on the flexibility that the pandemic proved was possible.“The work that we’re doing is in two separate fields,” said Anna Ortega, 23, who is active in Inland Empire Amazon Workers United, a group of warehouse workers, and has been working at an Amazon facility in San Bernardino, Calif., for almost two years. “It’s just showing us that Amazon has a problem with workers and listening to us.”Ms. Ortega spends her days lifting 50-pound packages — a task she could never do from home. But she said she supported the Amazon workers who were asking for the flexibility to keep working remotely.“If your employees are happy and are able to work productively from home, I think they would be able to bring better results,” Ms. Ortega said.An Amazon spokesman, Brad Glasser, said that the company respected “employees’ rights to express their opinions and peacefully assemble,” but that it had felt “good energy” since more employees returned to the office.Members of a union representing Starbucks store staff have offered support to corporate employees who petitioned in favor of remote work.Audra Melton for The New York TimesAt Starbucks, members of the union representing store workers have corresponded with corporate employees on Discord and other platforms, offering their support. And when corporate employees released their petition, they asked the company both to reverse its return-to-office policy and to allow free and fair union elections across stores.Jake Sklarew, 34, a software engineer at Starbucks who signed the petition, was frustrated by the return-to-office policy because during the pandemic he had bought a home in an affordable area, 30 miles from the office, thinking he’d be able to keep working remotely. Earlier in his career, when he worked in restaurants, he commuted as much as three hours a day, and he sees his current calls for fairer company policies as connected to the struggles of baristas demanding workplace respect.“The people that are working in stores, when you talk to them, they’re not asking for other people to have to work in person,” he said, adding that it wouldn’t make sense for Starbucks to end remote work for some just because not everyone can do it. “It feels to me like kind of an eye-for-an-eye situation: You’re not helping anyone — you’re just hurting everyone.”Starbucks has suggested that its policy, which requires its 3,750 corporate workers to come in three days a week, contains an element of equity for its employees, or “partners,” because “many partners didn’t have the privilege of working remotely.” But some union members have rejected this logic.To Sarah Pappin, 32, a Starbucks shift supervisor in Seattle, what corporate employees are asking for is directly related to what store employees are demanding, such as increased Covid safety protections.“Even jobs that you might think of as dream jobs can be exploited,” she said. “I think there is a growing understanding that we’re all workers.”But that sense of solidarity doesn’t erase the guilt that some office workers feel as they ask to hold on to the freedom of a workday in their living room. Many office workers have realized, too, all the advantages they have even in their organizing efforts.“We’re so much closer to leadership,” Mr. Lerma said. “I have access to a work-issued laptop that has provided me with the complete address book of everyone within Amazon. I have access to Slack, which can give me any contact I want. A warehouse employee doesn’t have that luxury.” More

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    Companies Are Pushing Back Harder on Union Efforts, Workers Say

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    Apple, Starbucks, Trader Joe’s and REI are accused of targeting union supporters after organizing efforts gained traction, charges the companies deny.After working for more than seven years at an Apple store in Kansas City, Mo., Gemma Wyatt ran into trouble.Last year, she said, managers disciplined her for clocking in late a few times over the previous several weeks. Then, in February, Apple fired her after she missed a store meeting because she was sick but failed to notify managers soon enough, according to Ms. Wyatt.She was at least the fifth Apple employee the store had fired since this fall, all of whom had been active in union organizing there. The terminations came after two other Apple stores voted to unionize.“It took us time to realize they weren’t firing us just because of time and attendance,” said Ms. Wyatt, who is part of a charge filed with the National Labor Relations Board in March accusing Apple of unfair labor practices.Apple said it had not disciplined or fired any workers in retaliation for union activity. “We strongly deny these claims and look forward to providing the full set of facts to the N.L.R.B.,” a spokeswoman said.A pattern of similar worker accusations — and corporate denials — has arisen at Starbucks, Trader Joe’s and REI as retail workers have sought to form unions in the past two years.Initially, the employers countered the organizing campaigns with criticism of unions and other means of dissuasion. At Starbucks, there were staffing and management changes at the local level, and top executives were dispatched. But workers say that in each case, after unionization efforts succeeded at one or two stores, the companies became more aggressive.Some labor relations experts say the companies’ progressive public profiles may help explain why they chose to hold back at the outset.“You’re espousing these values but saying this other organization claiming the same values” — the union — “isn’t good for your work force,” said David Pryzbylski, a labor lawyer at Barnes & Thornburg who represents employers. “It puts you in a little bit of corner.”Once the union wins a few elections, however, “you pull out all the stops,” Mr. Pryzbylski said.In some cases, the apparent escalation of company pushback has coincided with a slowing down of the union campaigns. At Starbucks, filings for union elections fell below 10 in August, from about 70 five months earlier, and no Apple store has filed for a union election since November.At Starbucks, the company unlawfully dismissed seven Buffalo-area employees last year, not long after the union won two elections there, according to a ruling by a federal administrative judge.A Trader Joe’s store in Louisville, Ky., which was the third at the company to unionize, fired two employees who were supportive of the union campaign and has formally disciplined several more, said Connor Hovey, a worker involved in the organizing. Documents shared by Mr. Hovey show the company citing a variety of issues, such as dress-code violations, tardiness and excessively long breaks.And in advance of a recent union election at an REI near Cleveland, management sought to exclude certain categories of workers from voting, according to the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union. It said the chain, a co-op that sells recreational gear, had made no such challenge in two previous elections, in which workers voted to unionize. (The union said the company had backed down after workers at the Cleveland-area store walked out, and the store voted to unionize in March.)Jess Raimundo, a spokeswoman for the United Food and Commercial Workers, which is also seeking to unionize REI stores, said the co-op had formally disciplined one employee in Durham, N.C., and put another on leave and later fired him over a workplace action that took place after the workers filed for a union election last month.Starbucks, which is appealing the ruling involving the Buffalo-area employees, has said the firings and discipline were unrelated to union organizing. A Trader Joe’s spokeswoman said that the company had never disciplined an employee for seeking to unionize but that unionizing efforts didn’t exempt an employee from job responsibilities.An REI spokeswoman said that the co-op sought to exclude certain categories of workers near Cleveland because it believed their duties made them ineligible to join a union, and that it had reached an agreement on the issue independent of the walkout. The spokeswoman said the two Durham employees had been disciplined for violations of company policies, not union activity.Across the companies, the shift is such that some organizers look back on their union campaigns’ early days with an odd measure of nostalgia.“Thinking about it, I wondered why they didn’t fight harder at our store,” said Maeg Yosef, a worker and an organizer at a Trader Joe’s in Massachusetts that became the company’s first store to unionize last year. “They were like, ‘Oops, you won’ and certified us. It was really hard, but relatively easy compared to the things they could have done.”The fight at Apple followed a similar trajectory. The company did not hide its suspicion of unions when workers at a U.S. store first filed for an election in April 2022, in Atlanta. Managers emphasized that employees could receive fewer promotions and less flexible hours if they unionized, and the company circulated a video of its head of retail questioning the wisdom of putting “another organization in the middle of our relationship.”Apple’s response was similar in two other union campaigns. But although the union withdrew its election filing in Atlanta, unions won elections in both subsequent cases — first in Towson, Md., in June and then in Oklahoma City in October.According to workers, the company became more aggressive once union organizers made inroads. Around the time that employees in Oklahoma City filed for a union election in September, managers at the Kansas City store disciplined several who supported unionizing for issues related to tardiness or absences that other workers typically have not been punished for, union backers said.Terminations began before the end of the year. D’lite Xiong, a union supporter who started at the Kansas City store in 2021 and uses gender-neutral pronouns, said they were told they were being fired just before Halloween. Mx. Xiong went on leave to buy time to appeal the decision, but was officially let go upon returning in January.D’lite Xiong, a union supporter, was fired from an Apple store in Kansas City, Mo. several months ago. Will Newton for The New York Times“It didn’t make sense to me — I had recently gotten promoted,” said Mx. Xiong, who speculated that the company discovered their role in union organizing after they sought to enlist co-workers. “I was praised for doing a great job.”The Communications Workers of America, which represents Apple workers in Oklahoma and has supported workers seeking to unionize the Kansas City store, filed the unfair labor practice charge against the company over the firings in March.John Logan, a professor at San Francisco State University who is an expert on anti-union campaigns, said companies often considered the potential dissatisfaction of customers, investors and even white-collar corporate employees when calibrating their response to a union campaign.“There’s something deeply threatening about the idea that you might be on the verge of losing them,” Mr. Logan said of corporate employees.But even these considerations, he said, tend to fade once a campaign gains traction: “The overriding priority is, ‘We have to crush this.’”This year, more than 70 Starbucks corporate employees placed their names on a petition calling on the company to stay neutral in union elections and to “respect federal labor laws.” The National Labor Relations Board has issued dozens of complaints against the company accusing it of illegal behavior, which the company denies.Howard Schultz, the former Starbucks chief executive, was quick to push back against such accusations while testifying before the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee in March, telling one senator, “I take offense with you categorizing me or Starbucks as a union-buster.”In late April, the labor board issued a complaint accusing the company of failing to bargain in good faith at more than 100 stores.A company spokesman attributed the delay to the union, including its insistence on broadcasting sessions using video-chat software, which could make it difficult to discuss sensitive topics.Apple, too, appears intent on signaling that it is not hostile to labor. The company agreed this year to assess its U.S. labor practices for consistency with its human rights policy. And the company has reached tentative agreements with the union at its Towson store on a handful of issues, such as a commitment that workers at the store will receive any improvement in 401(k) benefits that nonunion retail workers at the company might receive.Yet despite these gestures, there has been little progress on most of the union’s top noneconomic priorities, such as grievance procedures, and the company has sought broad contract provisions that could substantially weaken the union. For example, under a proposed a management-rights clause obtained by The New York Times, Apple would have wide latitude to use nonunion workers and contractors to do work performed by union members, which could shrink union membership. Labor negotiations typically start with noneconomic issues before moving to matters like wages and paid time off.Apple did not comment on the contract negotiations, but the workers in Oklahoma City have characterized their initial bargaining sessions as “very productive.”Mr. Pryzbylski, the lawyer who represents employers, said Apple’s preferred management-rights clause was “about as robust and aggressive as you can make it,” though he said it was not unusual for companies to seek such broad rights in their first contract.Workers expressed frustration at the breadth of the management proposal. “Everyone from the union at the table had never seen one so long,” said Kevin Gallagher, who serves on the bargaining committee in Towson. “They basically wanted to maintain all the rights of not having a union.” More

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    Former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz Spars With Democrats at Senate Hearing

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    Howard Schultz faced rancor from Senate Democrats at a hearing where he chafed at “propaganda that is floating around” about company labor practices.Howard Schultz was the star witness, but the hearing revealed almost as much about the party in power as it did about the longtime Starbucks chief executive.When Mr. Schultz appeared Wednesday before the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, at a session titled “No Company Is Above the Law: The Need to End Illegal Union Busting at Starbucks,” he encountered a Democratic Party much changed since some of his earlier trips to Washington.In 1994, President Bill Clinton invited Mr. Schultz to the White House for a private briefing on the company’s health care benefits. Two years later, the president praised Starbucks when introducing Mr. Schultz at a conference on corporate responsibility. At the time, Bernie Sanders was a backbencher in the House of Representatives.On Wednesday, Mr. Sanders, now chairman of the Senate committee, appeared to regard Mr. Schultz with something bordering on disdain.Before a question, Mr. Sanders, a Vermont independent who caucuses with the Democrats, felt the need to remind Mr. Schultz that federal law prohibits a witness from “knowingly and willfully making” a false statement relevant to an inquiry. The chairman then asked him if he had participated in decisions to fire or discipline workers involved in a union campaign. (Mr. Schultz said he had not.)Mr. Sanders noted that an administrative law judge had found “egregious and widespread misconduct” by Starbucks in its response to the campaign, in which nearly 300 of the roughly 9,300 corporate-owned stores in the United States have voted to unionize. And he chided Mr. Schultz for what he said was the company’s “calculated and intentional efforts to stall, to stall and to stall” rather than bargain with the union in good faith.Senator Bernie Sanders accused Starbucks of “calculated and intentional efforts to stall, to stall and to stall” in contract talks.Kenny Holston/The New York TimesThe hearing was held on the same day Starbucks reported that its shareholders had backed a proposal asking the company to commission an independent assessment of its practices as they relate to worker rights, including the right to bargain collectively and to form a union without interference.Though the proposal is nonbinding, the 52 percent vote in its favor suggests unease among investors over Starbucks’s response to the union campaign.Mr. Schultz, who recently ended his third tour as the company’s chief executive and remains a board member and major shareholder, seemed as mystified as anyone by his personal change of fortune in the capital. He chafed at what he described as “the propaganda that is floating around” the hearing and told Senator Bob Casey, Democrat of Pennsylvania, that “I take offense with you categorizing me or Starbucks as a union-buster.”When another Democrat, Senator Patty Murray of Washington — the home state of Starbucks — said she had heard from constituents about “widespread anti-union efforts,” Mr. Schultz reminded her that they had known each other for years and that she had “many times actually talked about Starbucks as a model employer.”He responded to Mr. Sanders’s accusation that Starbucks was not bargaining in good faith by noting that the company had met with the union over 85 times. (The union points out that most of these sessions ended within 15 minutes; Starbucks says this is because union members sought to take part remotely.) And he denied that Starbucks had broken the law; it has appealed the rulings against it.Aside from the accusations of labor law violations, the question at the heart of the hearing was: Can chief executives be trusted to treat their workers fairly?Mr. Schultz’s answer was an emphatic yes, at least in his case. He highlighted the company’s wide-ranging benefits — not just health care, including for part-time employees, but stock grants, paid sick leave, paid parental leave and free tuition at Arizona State University. He said that the average wage for hourly workers at Starbucks was $17.50, and that total compensation, including benefits, approached $27 an hour.“My vision for Starbucks Coffee Company has always been steeped in humanity, respect and shared success,” he said near the outset of the hearing.Some attending the hearing wore T-shirts signaling their support for the Starbucks union.Kenny Holston/The New York TimesRepublicans on the committee were quick to agree. Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky called Starbucks an “extraordinary tale of a company that started out of nothing and employs tens of thousands of people all making great wages.”Senator Mitt Romney of Utah, a former chief executive, said it was “somewhat rich that you’re being grilled by people who have never had the opportunity to create a single job.” He suggested that while a union might be necessary at companies “that are not good employers,” that was not the case at Starbucks.Democrats’ response came at two levels of elevation. First, they said the company was excluding unionized stores from the benefits that Starbucks had introduced since the union campaign began, such as faster accrual of sick leave and a credit-card tipping option for customers, showing that its commitment to such benefits was tenuous.The National Labor Relations Board has issued complaints calling the denial of benefits to union stores an attempt to discourage workers from organizing. Mr. Schultz said at the hearing that the company couldn’t offer the new benefits at union stores because the law said it must bargain over them first; legal experts have cast doubt on that interpretation.More broadly, Democrats argued that unions acted as a corrective to a basic power imbalance between workers and management. A company might treat workers generously under one chief executive, then harshly under another. Only a union can ensure that the favorable treatment persists, said Senator Edward J. Markey of Massachusetts.Yet in illustrating how far the politics of labor have changed in Washington in recent decades, there was perhaps no better bellwether than Senator John Hickenlooper of Colorado, a former business owner and self-described “extreme moderate.”Mr. Hickenlooper conducted himself more respectfully and deferentially than most of his Democratic colleagues, applauding Mr. Schultz for “creating one of the most successful brands in American history” and declaring that “you know more about economics than I will ever know.” But in his questioning he aligned himself squarely with his party, pointing out that the rise of inequality in recent decades had coincided with the weakening of unions.“I certainly respect the desire to be directly connected with all your employees,” he told Mr. Schultz. “But in many ways that right to organize, and that opportunity for people to be part of a union, is a crucial building block for the middle class and, I think, gave this country stability.” More

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    Starbucks Violated Labor Law in Buffalo Union Drive, Judge Rules

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    The decision cited “egregious and widespread misconduct,” including illegal monitoring and firing of workers. Starbucks signaled that it would appeal.In a sweeping decision, an administrative judge in New York ruled on Wednesday that Starbucks had violated federal labor law dozens of times in responding to a union campaign in the Buffalo area shortly after the campaign began roughly 18 months ago.Michael A. Rosas, a judge for the National Labor Relations Board, concluded that Starbucks had illegally monitored, disciplined and fired employees engaged in union organizing; added workers to stores to dilute support for the union; and promised new benefits to workers in an attempt to defuse support for the union.The ruling mandates the reinstatement of seven Buffalo-area workers who the judge concluded were unlawfully discharged from the company, and back pay and damages to more than two dozen workers who the judge concluded had suffered retaliation that affected their compensation, such as a reduction of hours.In addition, the judge ordered the chief executive of Starbucks, Howard Schultz, to read or be present for the reading of a notice, more than 10 pages long, promising to refrain from committing a series of labor law violations in the future, and to make and distribute a video of the reading.Because of the company’s “egregious and widespread misconduct demonstrating a general disregard for the employees’ fundamental rights,” Judge Rosas wrote, it was necessary to issue a broad order requiring Starbucks “to cease and desist from infringing in any other manner on rights guaranteed employees.”“This is truly a historic ruling,” Gary Bonadonna Jr., the regional head of Workers United, the union organizing Starbucks, said in a statement. “We will continue to fight and hold billionaires like Howard Schultz accountable for their actions. We will not rest until every Starbucks worker wins the right to organize.”The ruling can be appealed to the labor board in Washington, and to federal court after that, and Starbucks indicated that it might do so. “We believe the decision and the remedies ordered are inappropriate given the record in this matter and are considering all options to obtain further legal review,” the company said in a statement.The organizing campaign notched its first victory in Buffalo in 2021. Since then, more than 280 of the roughly 9,300 corporate-owned Starbucks locations in the United States have unionized. The ruling covers the period from August 2021 to July 2022, by which point the campaign had spread from the Buffalo area to dozens of stores nationwide.In the early months of the campaign, Starbucks workers complained that executives and other company officials were converging on Buffalo in an attempt to undermine their unionization effort.Judge Rosas found that Starbucks had violated labor law by “having high-ranking company officials make repeated and unprecedented visits to stores in order to more closely supervise, monitor or create the impression that employees’ union activities are under surveillance.”He also ordered the company to bargain with the union at a Buffalo-area location where the union lost an election in December 2021, concluding that the scope of the violations at the store tainted the vote and made a rerun of the election an “insufficient” remedy.It is rare but not unprecedented for a judge to effectively order in a union upon concluding that it had support among workers but that a fair vote is nearly impossible. More

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    Judge Scales Back Ruling Against Starbucks in Union Fight

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    After barring Starbucks from firing any U.S.-based worker over labor activity, a federal judge said he had erred and limited the action to one store.It was the most sweeping intervention by a court in the 18-month campaign to unionize Starbucks: Last week, a federal judge in Michigan issued an order blocking Starbucks from firing any U.S. worker because they engaged in collective action, like seeking to form a union.Union supporters cheered. Starbucks seemed taken aback, calling the order “extraordinary” and “unwarranted” and denying that the company had broken the law.But a few days later, the judge, Mark A. Goldsmith, announced that he had made certain unspecified “errors” and withdrew his earlier injunction. On Thursday, Judge Goldsmith issued a new injunction — only this time it was limited to a store in Michigan where a worker said she had been fired for her involvement in union organizing. The injunction’s national scope had vanished.In a revised opinion accompanying Thursday’s order, Judge Goldsmith said that the key criterion for determining whether to impose a nationwide injunction was whether the company had pursued a general policy of violating labor law. He said that while the National Labor Relations Board had filed about 24 complaints involving roughly 50 workers fired by Starbucks across the country, many of those cases were in their early stages.As a result, Judge Goldsmith concluded, the evidence supported an injunction only at a store in Ann Arbor, Mich., where a labor board judge found in October that a worker had illegally been fired.Legal experts said that the original injunction would have allowed the labor board to seek expedited reinstatement of workers who had been fired at any of the roughly 9,000 corporate-owned Starbucks stores in the country, and that it could have led to fines if the court found that Starbucks was continuing to fire workers for union organizing. Now those measures will apply only to a single store.The general counsel of the labor board, who oversees the office that had gone to federal court seeking the worker’s reinstatement, called the reversal disappointing but said in a statement that “the judge’s revised order still provides critical protection for the workers at Starbucks’ Ann Arbor store.” The statement said the agency would continue to seek nationwide remedies for labor law violations “as appropriate.”The union, Workers United, said it would “continue to fight for a national remedy to address Starbucks’ unprecedented union-busting campaign and hold the company accountable for their actions.”A Starbucks spokesman said, “We are pleased that the court rejected the National Labor Relations Board’s overreaching and inappropriate request for a nationwide cease-and-desist order as we pursue a full legal review of the merits of the case.”As to why the court initially issued the national injunction before abandoning it, Judge Goldsmith’s opinion did not elaborate.Legal experts said they couldn’t recall seeing a judge make a similar about-face. “I don’t think I can think of anything like this,” Wilma Liebman, a former chairwoman of the National Labor Relations Board, said in an email.Ms. Liebman said the most plausible explanation she could imagine was that the board had provided the judge with the order it was seeking, and that the judge had incorporated the order without sufficient modification — “careless but not intentionally mistaken,” Ms. Liebman said.A clerk reached at the court said the judge could not comment. More

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    How Is Your Company Responding to Labor Organizing? We Want to Hear.

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    Employers are taking a variety of approaches to union campaigns.An Amazon Labor Union rally on Staten Island in April.DeSean McClinton-Holland for The New York TimesMaterials being prepared for workers seeking to unionize Starbucks stores.Tony Luong for The New York TimesThere has been a surge in labor organizing among baristas at Starbucks, warehouse workers at Amazon and retail workers at Apple and Trader Joe’s. They have made their voices heard, though only a fraction of each group has joined a union, and some have rejected unionization.We’d like to hear the voices of those farther from the front lines — managers and white-collar workers at those companies, particularly those at corporate headquarters. If you fit this profile, please consider responding to the questions below. Your answers may help us better understand the state of labor relations and inform our reporting.We won’t publish your name or any part of your submission without contacting you first. If you prefer to share tips or thoughts confidentially, you can do so here.Tell us how your employer is dealing with union efforts. More