NEW YORK —The venal and vicious false front for the criminal corporate class, the so-called National Right To Work Committee and its legal defense fund, must be getting afraid of the accelerating grass-roots workers’ campaign to unionize Starbucks nationwide.
How else to explain their high-profile attempt to toss the Starbucks Workers United Union out of the big Starbucks Roastery in the Big Apple?
They must have figured that success in eliminating the union there, after SWU’s initial win a year before, would chill the national organizing drive. The RTW lobby’s try at eliminating the union, several months before, at the very first Starbucks to organize, in Buffalo, N.Y., failed.
The only problem with RTW’s attempt to stop the union in Manhattan was the anti-worker lobby’s lawyers didn’t have a legal leg to stand on, the National Labor Relations Board’s Manhattan Regional Director, John Doyle Jr., ruled.
Doyle threw the committee’s case out. And because Starbucks refuses to bargain with its workers at the Roastery—or anywhere else—Doyle ruled labor law gives Starbucks Workers United an extra year of certification as their union rep.
Let’s back up for a lesson in the nation’s current, pro-corporate labor law, to show how mixed up this mess is.
Under labor law, as watered down by the Republicans and the corporate class in the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act, once the NLRB certifies a union to represent a group of workers, the union has a year “free” to bargain a contract without the threat of bosses using willing stooges and shills, trying to throw it out.
But once that year is over dissatisfied workers can circulate a “decert (decertification) petition” to eject the union. If the NLRB OK’s their petition, there’s a decertification election. If decert wins, the union is out, and employees become at-will workers, again subject to the bosses’ whims.
There are three caveats to a decert petition. One is only workers, not bosses, can circulate and sign it. A second is the petition needs signatures from at least 30% of the workers before the NLRB will even look at it. The third is that other than not reaching a contract, the bosses better have followed labor law and not committed any unfair labor practices.
Those are the rules. In practice, an outside outfit, such as the RTW Committee, hunts up a willing stooge or shill to start the decert going. Or the boss finds someone. Sometimes the boss doesn’t even seek a shill but starts the petition, and that’s illegal. And a boss who backs decert petitions almost always has broken labor law in some way, shape, or form, but has to convince the NLRB to overlook its misdeeds as trivial.
Now let’s go to the New York Roastery at 60 Ninth Avenue in Manhattan. Start with the vote there. The Roastery workers and Starbucks Workers United, which helps their nationwide organizing drive—including with legal aid—won in April 2022, 46-36. That began the one-year clock.
When the year was up, worker Kevin Caesar began a decert petition at the Roastery. The RTW crowd gleefully stepped in to virtually take over. Signature-gathering can be done by anyone, even though decert petition signers must be workers in the targeted shop. And the RTW Committee provided Caesar with the lawyer who argued the case before Doyle. For free.
Caesar and his lawyer never told Doyle, at least publicly in the regional director’s ruling, how many workers signed the decert petition. But it had to be more than the minimum or Doyle wouldn’t have to consider the other standards for accepting or rejecting the petition. And that’s where the decert foundered, he ruled.
Starbucks refuses to bargain with its workers and SWU as a coalition of all 340-plus unionized stores. Starbucks bosses, led by their union-buster, walked out of talks after five minutes each of the first two nationwide sessions, giving the excuse for the second that they didn’t want to bargain in front of a nationwide crowd of workers who literally Zoomed in.
Instead, Starbucks and the creator of its anti-union hate, founder Howard Schultz, want to “divide and conquer” the workers through one-by-one, store-by-store talks.
Its walkouts are “refusals to bargain” under labor law and break a nationwide NLRB bargaining order to Starbucks. SWU said so and filed that complaint with Doyle. If Doyle found Starbucks refused to bargain, the company broke the law—and then the law says the workers at the Roastery get an extra year of “free” union representation.
Which is what Doyle ruled. The union and the NLRB’s General Counsel’s office filed the labor law-breaking charge. It included refusing to bargain, “not even acknowledging demands to bargain, not providing a single bargaining date” to start the talks, and refusing to give SWU legally required financial information to bargain with.
Doyle ruled those unfair labor practices got in the way of the decert petition. He rejected it, but pointed out there will be a hearing on the unfair labor practices themselves. It will start on September 19. If there’s no proven labor law-breaking at the Roastery, then the decert petition could be revived. Still, Doyle came down hard on the decert try.
“Allowing the certification year to elapse while an employer delayed and undermined the bargaining process ‘would be to allow it to take advantage of its own failure to carry out its statutory obligation, contrary to the very reasons for the establishment of the rule that a certification requires bargaining for at least one year,’” Doyle wrote. The same principle applies when the boss engages in “surface bargaining,” Doyle added. “The same is true here.”
“Moreover, the board construes the initial period of the certification as beginning on the date the respondent [company] begins to bargain in good faith with the union.” Which is what Starbucks has refused to do.
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