The battle between big labor and independent work is boiling over at Starbucks.
Workers at a growing number of stores nationwide are petitioning to decertify Starbucks Workers United from their locations. Think of union decertification as an emergency brake for employees: It provides an “out” for workers who want to reacquire their right to negotiate contracts and work independently in cases where their union has been “certified” — or authorized to act as their bargaining representative — for over a year without reaching a first contract. In theory, filing a decertification petition kickstarts an electoral process where workers vote on whether to retain or reject their current union representative (in Starbucks’ case, the service industry mega-union Workers United). Along with being a bulwark of workplace democracy, decertification petitions and elections are critical stop-gap measures that protect worker choice when first contract negotiations are still brewing.
Unless that is, the union gets steamed.
Per Biden-era labor law revisions, unions now have a new, federally-sanctioned tool for stonewalling employees’ attempts to operate independently. Current labor codes allow partnerships to file blocking charges against any decertification petition, stripping workers of the choice to decertify and handing the matter off instead to National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) officials. At their discretion, regulators can then axe the petition and nullify any employee decertification initiative — meaning that workers are effectively trapped once a union has taken shape at a corporation.
That’s the nightmare scenario now foaming up at Starbucks, but it points to a much deeper problem in the dregs of U.S. labor policy. Simply put a dangerous disconnect between intentions and outcomes stymies worker independence and allows mega-unions like Workers United to hijack any employee decision-making process.
The NLRB’s unprecedented new power to postpone indefinitely or outright block decertification attempts isn’t a tool for safeguarding worker rights. It’s a battering ram that Workers United is explicitly weaponizing against employees’ right to work. And by handing regional bureaucrats the power to quash any move toward alternative modes of bargaining, it’s all too capable of being wielded bluntly and arbitrarily absent any real oversight.
Not to mention, granting regulators the authority to nullify decertification elections violates one of the most basic tenets of workplace democracy. Aren’t unions supposed to be for that?
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This year, NLRB Regional Director Linda Leslie has nixed two decertification petitions from workers in Buffalo and Rochester, citing widespread accusations of employee abuse, federal labor law violations, and claims of bad-faith bargaining tactics from Starbucks nationally.
Those allegations give the NLRB ostensible cause to hamstring the decertification process at any store. But that’s getting it backward. Rejecting individual workers’ appeals for the agency is hardly a corrective for corporate misbehavior.
It also diverts officials’ attention from what’s potentially a much more widespread problem. Starbucks has indeed fallen into serious hot water over employee abuse accusations of late. And the company has a lot to answer for when it comes to the numerous federal labor law violations they’re both alleged and found to have committed.
But certainly, a regulatory network as large and powerful as Biden’s NLRB can walk and chew gum simultaneously. Why not allow workers to operate democratically and hold decertification elections while labor relations watchdogs direct their resources and energy toward investigating the real and concerning abuse claims pending against the corporation? After all, if Starbucks is in the wrong for denying workers the freedom to choose their preferred mode of organization, why are bureaucrats and big labor in the right for doing the same?
Until then, the NLRB and Workers United are botching their orders. You can’t fix police worker rights violations with further worker rights violations. And stonewalling is stonewalling — whether done by employers at the bargaining table or bureaucratic middlemen at a regional office desk.
Amanda Griffiths is a contributor for Young Voices and a Ph.D. student at UW-Madison. Her work has been featured in National Review, Reason, The Federalist, and on The Young Turks Network’s “Indisputable.”
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