Abstract
In the wake of the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, Starbucks workers launched an unprecedented movement to organize workers at each store. Starbucks management responded to this movement with an unlawful union busting campaign. The National Labor Relations Board found that the Starbucks campaign violated workers’ rights to engage in union activity under the National Labor Relations Act. Starbucks’ efforts allowed them to stave off any collective bargaining agreement between the stores and the union. The company adopted aggressive tactics in the run-up to worksite elections which the Board found amounted to unlawful interference. The endeavor to organize workers at Starbucks stores is a case study of all the shortcomings of the National Labor Relations Act. The complaints about the ineffectiveness of the National Labor Relations Act are well documented, and countless solutions have been recommended. This Comment will revisit some of those grievances and how they remain relevant in the labor movement’s challenges against Starbucks. This Comment will endorse the Protecting the Right to Organize Act of 2021. But in addition to that endorsement, this Comment will examine new developments in administrative law that portend that administrative adjudications will no longer be an effective process to enforce the law. These new developments include the possible inability of federal agencies to seek civil penalties in administrative adjudications and the legal challenges to for-cause removal protections for Administrative Law Judges and head agency officials. As a result, this Comment will recommend that all enforcement proceedings under the National Labor Relations Act be removed to Article III federal courts. While this proposal is likely to receive skepticism, it will ensure that enforcement against employers is not thwarted by politics and that workers’ rights under the National Labor Relations Act are protected.
Recommended Citation
Ivan Garcia,
Suppressing the Surge: Starbucks and the Limits of Labor Rights,
130
Dick. L. Rev.
741
(2026).
Available at:
https://insight.dickinsonlaw.psu.edu/dlr/vol130/iss2/10