by Samuel Messidor
The Supreme Court this week reversed a judge’s orders on behalf of the National Labor Relations Board to rehire Starbucks workers fired for their organizing efforts. The Supreme Court’s reversal hampers the NLRB’s ability to enforce federal rules against punitively firing labor organizers. Before, two competing standards existed for re-hire injunctions, but now the stricter interpretation of punitive firing will be required: that companies have caused “irreparable harm” by firing organizers, whereas before the NLRB only needed show “reasonable suspicion” that firings broke labor law.
The 7 Memphis, Tennessee Starbucks workers have been fighting their punitive firing, which the coffee monopoly claims was due to them letting a news crew into the store after hours. The workers say the company selectively applies this standard. The NLRB and a Tennessee judge agreed, but now the Supreme Court has sided with Starbucks, which had appealed the judge’s order.
The NLRB seeks injunctions from judges to quickly rehire punitively fired workers during organizing drives because the standard adjudication process to make final rulings drag on for years, and in the meantime the firings take their toll on the effort.
Over 400 US Starbucks locations have voted to unionize in the last 4 years, with Starbucks claiming they want to accept the unionized shops. Starbucks has so far reached contract agreements with a grand total of zero of those 400+ shops.
Meanwhile, a New York court has reversed a judge’s order that Amazon refrain from firing union organizers. The order pertained to an organizer at the Long Island Amazon warehouse which is the first and so far only Amazon facility to unionize, under the independent Amazon Labor Union. The judge refrained from ordering the company to rehire the organizer, applying strict language that the firing did not show evidence of a “broader effect,” akin to the Supreme Court-backed language about “irreparable harm” from the firing.
The Amazon organizer was fired allegedly for making rude comments to a coworker during a rally demanding PPE at the height of the Covid pandemic in 2020. This is despite the NLRB adopting rules that protect employee’s speech while exercising their organizing rights, lauded at the time of implementation by the Teamsters as a big win for labor because supposedly companies would not be able to use the excuse of an organizer’s specific language making other workers uncomfortable.
Amazon has yet to reach a contract with the ALU four years on, and now the union is affiliating with the Teamsters in efforts to boost their organizing and pressure the company.
The monopolists are relying on the courts to attack “administrative agencies” of the state, like the NLRB, to weaken the people’s rights.
Corporations fire organizers to repress union drives, both to remove “trouble-makers” and to frighten the workers in general. Recent polls show that over 60 million unorganized workers in the US want to unionize but the barriers remain high, for instance in the form of repression from the monopolies and their ruling class courts. Nevertheless, workers are getting organized in the last few years to the tune of nearly 200,000 new unionized private sector workers in 2023, even while public sector unionization is dropping.
