If you can believe it, there might be even more Starbucks locations coming to Los Angeles County soon.
Federal labor regulators are looking to forcibly reopen 23 closed Starbucks cafes across the country, including six in LA County. The National Labor Relations Board claims these stores were closed due to unlawful union suppression, and they request that former employees be reinstated and compensated for the time off.
Is it legal for the federal government to force a corporation to reopen stores?
UCLA Labor Center Director Saba Waheed says yes, if the courts say so.
“This is going to go to court. And if [the federal government] can prove that Starbucks closed these stores as a retaliation to unionizing efforts, then yes, they can require them to reopen the stores. In the same way that if [Starbucks] fired a worker for organizing, that worker can be reinstated and paid back wages,” explains Waheed.
The Starbucks labor conflict is coming off the back of the colloquially dubbed “hot labor summer,” where screenwriters, actors, and hospitality workers organized for better labor agreements and saw major wins. Despite this, Starbucks employees have found it increasingly difficult to get a collective bargaining agreement since the union Starbucks Workers United formed in 2021.
Waheed claims this is intentional.
“Often, it’s a tactic when employers are trying to cut down some of the [union] momentum [to] drag your feet with the contracts. We definitely saw that in the Starbuckses, [they] hadn’t met since May of this year to actually negotiate,” says Waheed.
Starbucks has until December 27, 2023 to respond to the NLRB’s complaint, and an administrative hearing in the case is scheduled for August 20, 2024.