Starbucks declined to comment. The company has repeatedly said that it obeys US labour laws and that any claims of anti-union activity are “categorically false.” It has said that workers in question were fired because they failed to follow company policies and not because they sought to join a union.
Those complaints are now pending with agency judges, whose rulings can be appealed to labour board members in Washington, and from there into federal court. He cited employers such as Microsoft and Major League Baseball, which recently agreed to make it easier for employees to unionise. The group’s Starbucks proposal echoes a similar one Lander and others recently submitted at Apple, which has yet to receive a vote from shareholders.
That’s because federal law doesn’t require that companies make major concessions on issues that newly unionised workers care about, and the NLRB has limited remedies to respond to stonewalling at the bargaining table. Reaching an agreement after unionising usually takes more than a year, and the process can drag on much longer.