What the Starbucks case at the Supreme Court is all about. Hint: It's not coffee
MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Starbucks goes to the U.S. Supreme Court today.
A MARTÍNEZ, HOST:
Yeah. The case stems from the coffee house chain's long-running standoff with employees who've been trying to unionize, and the justices will weigh a big question - how much power should the government have to protect workers during a labor investigation? Given the Court's conservative tilt, the ruling could further tip the scales in unionization disputes from workers to employers.
MARTIN: NPR's Alina Selyukh is here to explain. Good morning.
ALINA SELYUKH, BYLINE: Hello, hello.
MARTIN: So tell us more about this case. How did it start?
SELYUKH: Yeah. So this case is about what happens when workers accuse their employer of breaking labor laws and federal authorities ask a court to intervene while they investigate, and that's what happened with Starbucks. For the past 2 1/2 years, workers at hundreds of coffee shops have pushed to unionize and Starbucks have fought these campaigns, and this Supreme Court case started with a pretty dramatic situation with a group of workers in Tennessee called the Memphis Seven.
MARTIN: OK. The Memphis Seven. What happened?
SELYUKH: Starbucks fired them. It was a group of seven baristas and shift supervisors. They'd launched a union campaign at their store - this was two years ago - and Starbucks fired them, saying they broke many company rules, including when they let a TV crew into a closed store. The workers said it was retaliation for their union work, which is protected by law, so federal labor authorities got involved, and this is the crux of it. That legal process takes a very long time, sometimes years, so while labor officials investigated, they asked a federal district court to sort of reset everything in the meantime. That included reinstating the fired workers, rehiring the Memphis Seven. The court agreed, but Starbucks appealed, and it kept appealing all the way now to the Supreme Court.
MARTIN: So it sounds like this case is about the government's power to get involved on workers' behalf before the investigation is done and everything's sorted out.
SELYUKH: Yes. And Starbucks argues that puts a big burden on employers who say they are not breaking any laws. And even more specifically, actually, the question before the Supreme Court is about how easy it should be for labor officials to get a court to intervene, and this matters because that's one of the few tools the National Labor Relations Board has to enforce labor law. The agency does not have many ways of making a company stop doing whatever it's doing that officials believe is illegal while the investigations and hearings drag on, so occasionally, the board asks for an injunction from a federal district court. This is where Starbucks argues some of those courts give the labor officials too much leeway, letting the government meet a lower legal bar than they should, and Starbucks wants the Supreme Court to fix that.
MARTIN: Well, I think we've seen this court rule a number of times against labor unions and in favor of business interests. Do we have a sense of what would happen, what the impact would be, if Starbucks prevails in this case?
SELYUKH: Well, I think it would send a message that some judges are maybe too quick to grant these injunctions during federal labor investigations. That's what Starbucks is seeking. Unions worry that it could also make unionizing harder, and pro-union workers talk about the potential chilling effect of the top court siding with the employer. We heard this from Starbucks worker Florentino Escobar, who's one of the Memphis Seven.
FLORENTINO ESCOBAR: My biggest fear is just the Supreme Court making it to where it's going to be much harder for labor unions, whether it's Starbucks or any other corporation, to follow in our footsteps.
SELYUKH: Follow in the footsteps meaning voting to unionize. Fundamentally, labor laws over recent decades have made it more difficult for unions to organize and to bring labor complaints, but now, companies argue labor officials under President Biden have gotten more aggressive trying to help unions along, and a ruling here could tilt the power dynamic between federal labor watchdogs and companies resisting unionization.
MARTIN: That is NPR's Alina Selyukh. Alina, thank you.
SELYUKH: Thank you.
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