Starbucks Workers United’s lackluster repeat moves:
Last fall, Starbucks Workers United (SWU) accompanied their strike with requests that customers also boycott the coffeehouse chain. Well, that didn’t work out too well for the union because the company’s corresponding earnings report reflected that the strike did not have a material impact on sales. In fact, CEO Brian Niccol revealed that U.S. same-store sales were up 4% after viral holiday drinks boosted revenue, but that won’t stop SWU from attempting another boycott.
That’s precisely what the union is doing again. This week, SWU “officially” called for another boycott with dates and details allegedly coming soon. Also, the union has been bragging for months about their 700th election victory, and even though a three-month strike at scattered stores didn’t hurt Starbucks, isolated stores are still holding one-day strikes. It’s rinse and repeat from SWU, and nothing seems to help the two sides reach a deal. Negotiations have been on-and-off for four years with no contract in sight.
The scrutiny on Shawn Fain is going mainstream:
We haven’t been able to keep our eyes away from how United Auto Workers (UAW) election season has been clouded by a grand jury subpoena about federal monitor Neil Barofsky’s ongoing investigations.
Barofsky has issued sixteen reports that include allegations about Shawn Fain’s questionable financial expenditures and culture of retaliation. Further, a UAW attorney told Bloomberg that the union “broadly is not the subject of a grand jury investigation,” which didn’t sound great for Fain.
Well, the New York Times has now published an unflattering portrait detailing, among other things, Fain’s “confrontational style” and how “[f]ormer allies have turned on him.” This report further confirms that the U.S. attorney’s office in Detroit is conducting “a criminal investigation into Mr. Fain’s conduct, prompted by the monitor’s findings.”
There’s a lot inside, including the Times going long on Barofsky and Fain’s combative discussions about Fain’s unsavory remarks on the Gaza war. Those clashes, as previously reported by the Detroit Free Press, culminated in Fain “threaten[ing] to fight the monitor in the parking lot.”
It’s certainly not wise to try to fist-fight a federal monitor, but ultimately, the Times relays word from Barofsky’s firm, Jenner & Block, that “[t]he monitor’s findings rest solely on the facts set out in his reports.”
The aftermath of Cesar Chavez revelations continues:
In March, the New York Times investigative report detailing an alleged “pattern of sexual misconduct” against United Farm Workers (UFW) co-founder Cesar Chavez led to his portrait’s swift removal from the Department of Labor headquarters. Additionally, California lawmakers swiftly voted to rename Cesar Chavez Day (Mar. 31) as Farmworkers Day after that report included rape accusations from Chavez’s fellow UFW co-founder, Dolores Huerta.
Months later, landmarks, schools, and libraries across the nation are still working to downplay Chavez’s ghost, but updates have been rolling in:
- San Jose, CA recently revealed rankings of potential renames for a plaza;
- Albuquerque, NM is relabeling multiple sites;
- Seattle, WA is working through a similar process;
- Phoenix, AZ has renamed a park with city board approval.
However, Cesar Chavez High School in Stockton, CA will retain its name for now after a heated public discussion that isn’t finished yet.
Nursing strikes aplenty:
Last week, we told you about how unions are moving up the physician career ladder by organizing attending physicians, and UC Doctors United recently launched as a Doctors Council-SEIU offshoot with the mission of unionizing 10,000 UC physicians. Don’t forget about nurses, though.
Unions haven’t forgotten about them, and Big Labor is planning to launch multiple strikes in the next few weeks. The affected hospitals scheduled for one-day strikes include Saint Mary of Nazareth Hospital in Chicago and Saint Mary’s Regional Medical Center in Reno, along with Shasta Regional Medical Center in Redding, CA. Also, the Teamsters Michigan nursing strike at Henry Ford Genesys will hit its one-year anniversary on Sept. 1.
The successor bar is down. Is the contract bar next?
It’s Friday, and this isn’t the most easily digestible subject. Yet it’s a highly consequential D.C. Circuit decision regarding the NLRB’s ability, or lack thereof, to dream up standards without authority from the NLRA.
In Hospital Menonita de Guayama, Inc. v. NLRB, the court found that the Board didn’t have the statutory authority to create the successor bar, which forced businesses to keep bargaining with an inherited union for up to a year, even without majority worker support for the union.
However, the court didn’t draw the same conclusion regarding the contract bar. This bar presumes that a union still has majority support during a labor contract, and the judges found a rebuttable presumption for the contract bar, which can be disproven with evidence, whereas the successor bar couldn’t be challenged at all.
Still, the contract bar remains vulnerable, since the court did not declare that this bar is supported by statute. In a future case, there’s every possibility that another court could run with the D.C. Circuit’s finding that the Board cannot invent blocks (beyond the specific time-limited block on challenging a union’s support right after an election) and strike down the contract bar, too. Stay tuned.
