Federal labor board has been much more pro-worker under Biden. Employers want courts to end that

Starbucks and the National Labor Relations Board, the federal agency charged with protecting workers’ rights, will be battling each other before the Supreme Court Tuesday, in one of numerous cases now pending in which major employers are questioning the NLRB’s powers, and even its right to exist.

Starbucks and the National Labor Relations Board, the federal agency charged with protecting workers’ rights, will battle each other before the Supreme Court Tuesday, in one of numerous cases now pending in which major employers are questioning the NLRB’s powers and even its right to exist. The NLRB under the labor-friendly Biden administration has been overseeing a period of significantly more organizing and strike activities by the nation’s unions. Some high-profile companies are complaining that the agency is abusing its powers. The companies are asking federal courts, often with conservative, pro-business judges, to stop the agency from standing behind the more activist unions now making their lives more difficult. Tuesday’s Supreme Court case involves the NLRB’s powers to get employees whom it judges were wrongly fired for union activity immediately rehired, rather than forcing them to go through a long, drawn-out court process. At issue are seven employees Starbucks fired at a store in Memphis in 2022 that the union said were attempting to organize. The employees, known as the “Memphis 7,” have become a nationwide symbol for labor supporters. Starbucks is arguing that the NLRB’s powers are not being applied uniformly across the country because some federal courts, including the courts that reviewed the Memphis 7 case, are using what critics describe as a more lenient standard to force employers to take preliminary action. In this case, the lower courts required Starbucks to reinstate the employees it had fired. “The NLRB has long used the federal courts … to obtain injunctions … before the merits of an unfair labor practice case are fully evaluated,” said a statement from Starbucks. “As a company, we felt obligated to stand up for what is right, not only for our partners and our company, but also for the employers across the country who are subject to NLRB requests for injunctions in federal courts.” But the NLRB argues that the only way to protect workers who are improperly terminated for union activity is to allow it to go to federal court and get immediate action against the offending employer, as it successfully did in the case of the Memphis employees.