Starbucks Sees Pro-Union Bias at the NLRB

Starbucks says NLRB employees gave the Workers United-SEIU union confidential real-time information about whether and how many ballots were received on particular dates, “thereby improperly enabling the Union to monitor the status of voting and, through process of elimination, identify and specifically target individuals who had not yet voted.”

When union reps said pro-union workers hadn’t received ballots in the mail, NLRB employees prepared duplicate ballots while arranging for these same workers to vote in person at the agency’s local office.

These special arrangements violated Starbucks’s election agreement with the union, Starbucks says, and “converted the mail-ballot only election into an impromptu mixed mail/manual election for a handful of select individuals who were hand-picked and solicited by the Union, and with the NLRB giving improper support to a single party.”

The complaint says NLRB employees then went to great lengths to conceal favors to the union. Four NLRB employees attended the ballot counting, which Starbucks and union representatives were obliged to witnessed via Zoom. When ballots materialized without postmarks, an NLRB employee falsely asserted that “Board protocol” allowed some workers to vote in-person at the agency’s office.

With the union leading in the ballot count, an NLRB employee took seven unopened ballots that were challenged by the union or Starbucks out of the room to photocopy. It’s unclear what then happened to them, but the NLRB employee signed the Starbucks attorney’s name to the ballot tally despite her objections.

Starbucks is challenging the union’s election victory, and it has asked the NLRB to suspend other mail-ballot elections until an investigation is done. It also wants future elections to be conducted exclusively in-person—as they were before the pandemic.

According to the complaint, an election this spring at a store in Buffalo was set aside after NLRB employees were found to have not counted seven valid mail-in ballots. Starbucks also says it has encountered “misconduct and the absence of neutrality” by NLRB agents in numerous unfair labor practice cases.

An NLRB regional director charged Starbucks with surveilling employees engaged in protected labor activity and retaliating against three union supporters. But in depositions in federal court, two of the workers contradicted the director and a third provided testimony proven false by store security video. The judge dismissed the director’s complaint.

Starbucks also notes that NLRB regional offices and the board’s general counsel repeatedly proclaim that Starbucks committed more than 100 “unfair labor practice” violations, though none of these complaints to date have been proven. Such accusations are intended to sully Starbucks’s reputation and give ammunition for union organizers.

The NLRB says it doesn’t comment on open cases but has “well-established processes” for parties to challenge how elections are handled. The agency is supposed to be neutral in labor elections, but the agency tilted hard to the left in the

Obama

years and appears to be doing so again. The Starbucks complaint raises questions about the integrity of union elections. If the courts won’t intervene, Republicans have another job if they win the House in November.