Starting with one small shop in Buffalo, Starbucks workers have unionized 481 stores with more than 11,000 employees in less than three years. It’s a staggering demonstration of what can be accomplished when an aggressive union, an eager work force and a labor-friendly Democratic administration wind up in alignment.
But this best-case scenario also shows how American labor laws, and the bureaucracy they require, make mass unionization impossible unless rules for certifying unions and negotiating contracts are simplified and streamlined.
To certify these 11,000 new union members, the National Labor Relations Board, the agency primarily responsible for administering federal labor law and protecting workers from employer retaliation, has had to take on an enormous workload. With an overall budget of $299 million and a staff of around 1,200, the N.L.R.B. has conducted over 550 union elections, processed more than 1,000 unfair labor practice charges and issued roughly 300 decisions in cases involving the company.
N.L.R.B. lawyers have also filed for 12 preliminary injunctions against Starbucks, the company accounting for more than 40 percent of all the injunctions the agency sought last year.
The agency’s legal documents in Starbucks cases comprised at least 2.7 million words, according to a database I compiled, not counting hearing transcripts, complaints, motions and briefs that I suspect would at least double that figure.
Much of this activity occurred after workers organized, with the union filing refusal-to-bargain charges against the company, which has so far resisted coming to a collective bargaining agreement. (Starbucks recently returned to bargaining after nearly a year without talks.) Starbucks has also helped efforts to decertify the union at various stores.
If this is how many government resources are required to certify just over 11,000 new union members, then it would clearly be unsustainable for the government if the enthusiasm we’ve seen at Starbucks were to spread to other companies and other unions. Without reforms, a huge wave of unionization would find itself paralyzed in the bottleneck of the N.L.R.B. process.
In fact, something like this has already happened. At the same time as the N.L.R.B. has been forced to dedicate so much of its time to the Starbucks campaign, the waiting time for various agency processes increased by close to 50 percent. The success of Starbucks workers has most likely come at the expense of other workers whose efforts to insist on the recognition of their rights have languished in the N.L.R.B.’s growing backlog.
Labor leaders have been saying for decades that the country’s labor laws make unionization too difficult and fail to protect workers from illegal employer resistance. Progressives have been pressing for the Protecting the Right to Organize Act, which would prohibit anti-union activity by employers. That legislation is sorely needed.
But even more important is to revive and pass the Employee Free Choice Act, which would allow unions to be certified if a majority of workers sign certification cards. This would assess workers’ support or opposition to unionization without requiring the government to run costly elections. The legislation would also allow an arbitrator to approve first contracts when bargaining breaks down, preventing companies from dragging out negotiations endlessly, refusing to sign collective bargaining agreements and then assisting efforts to decertify unions — as has been the case with Starbucks.
Democrats failed to get this legislation passed even when they controlled the presidency and both houses of Congress during the Obama administration. And while employers claim its provisions give unions too much clout and interfere with private negotiations, they are fair, sensible and, most important, efficient reforms that uphold the spirit of the foundational labor laws enacted by President Franklin Roosevelt.
It should be a policy centerpiece for Democrats (and for Republicans who have made such a big show of supposedly supporting unions). Without it, there is very little that the labor movement can do to overcome formidable legal obstacles and increase its ranks.
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