Get the Cuffs, Ponch

NLRB administrative law judge Judge Michael Rosas just went medieval on Starbucks scorched earth tactics against its employees unionizing.

Unfortunagely, I don't think that as an NLRB judge he has the legal authority to order Starbucks CES Howard Schultz frog-marched pit of his offices in handcuffs, but he has ordered Schultz to read a notice to his employees regarding their rights under federal law as well as provide back pay to fired employees:

Starbucks committed “egregious and widespread” violations of federal labor law while trying to halt union campaigns, ruled a federal administrative law judge, who ordered the coffee giant to reopen closed stores and reimburse backpay and damages to employees who launched a nationwide organizing drive at the company.

Starbucks showed “a general disregard for the employees’ fundamental rights,” Judge Michael A. Rosas wrote in a 220-page order released Wednesday.

In resolving an extensive case that combined 33 unfair labor practices charges from 21 stores in the Buffalo area, Rosas held that the company retaliated against employees affiliated with Starbucks Workers United as they began a union drive in 2021. Since then, 268 of the roughly 9,000 company-owned U.S. stores have voted to unionize, and Starbucks’s interim chief executive Howard Schultz has drawn the ire of liberal political leaders.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), chairman of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, said Wednesday that he would force a vote to subpoena Schultz as part of a hearing about unionization efforts at Starbucks.

Like this lawless rat-bastard will obey a Congressional subpoena.

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Rosas’s order requires Starbucks to halt a sweeping list of behaviors that include: retaliating against employees for unionizing; promising improved pay and benefits if workers renounced the union; surveilling union-supporting employees while on-site; refusing to hire prospective employees who back the union; and relocating union organizers to new stores to halt the group’s activity, overstaffing stores ahead of union votes.

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Rosas’s order also calls for Schultz and Denise Nelson, the company’s senior vice president of U.S. operations, to read a 14-page notice that explains workers’ rights and how the company violated the law.

That same notice must be posted in each of the company’s stores, Rosas ruled, and shared digitally with employees. He also ordered Starbucks to begin negotiating a collective bargaining agreement with Buffalo-area workers.

………

The company said workers were terminated after violating company policies and not in retaliation for engaging in union activity. The judge did not accept that explanation.

Neither did anyone else with two brain cells to rub together.

Starbucks dismissed employees who were involved in organizing campaigns for cursing while on the job, even though cursing was common and usually did not result in discipline, Rosas held. After another employee appeared in a Washington Post report about the Starbucks union drive, a manager changed her hours in a way Rosas held was discriminatory and amounted to a firing.

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“The evidence established that the Respondent’s actions were driven by discriminatory motivation to eliminate yet another union supporter,” Rosas wrote of one of the employee’s terminations. “Its widespread coercive behavior over six months had permeated every store in the Buffalo market.”

The costs of this sort of behavior to American businesses is vanishingly small, even with back pay.

This will not stop until FBI agents with battering rams start arresting lawbreaking executives, as well as the anti-union law firms that go beyond legal counsel, and instruct their clients about how to break the law.