Yahoo Finance

Asked about Starbucks (SBUX) accusing the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) of unfairly rigging union elections and seeking a pause in votes, a legal expert stressed that the coffee giant is still dealing with a larger issue at hand: The rapid unionization itself.

"Starbucks has a problem," Rachel Demarest Gold, an employer-side attorney at Abrams Fensterman, LLP, told Yahoo Finance in a phone interview. "By the time a workforce gets to the point where it's in an election for union representation, the company already has a problem and probably has had a problem for a long time with its employees because satisfied workers don't turn to unions."

The union drive at Starbucks stores nationwide began in December 2021 at a store in Buffalo, New York, and more than 310 stores in 36 states have filed for election petitions. Starbucks Workers United, a subsidiary of the Workers United labor union, is leading organization efforts.

According to records from the NLRB, an independent federal labor agency with leaders appointed by President Biden, more than 220 stores have voted in favor of unionization so far.

Starbucks has strongly opposed unionization, with CEO Howard Schultz denouncing the "threat of unionization" and rolling out pay increases for store employees that exclude those at unionized stores.

NLRB regional offices have issued nearly 20 unfair labor practice complaints against Starbucks. The agency has also asked a court to halt the company's alleged union-busting campaign.

The coffee giant is now accusing the NLRB of impropriety: On Monday, Starbucks sent a 16-page letter to NLRB officials accusing the agency of managing union elections in a way that unfairly helped workers unionize.

"It's tit for tat," Gold said. "It's an adversarial process. So if I find that you have done something wrong and it helps my case, I'm gonna bring it up."

Starbucks's letter to the NLRB

In the letter, Starbucks alleged that the agency's regional staff repeatedly crossed the line of neutrality during an election in the Kansas City area by secretly coordinating "in-person" voting at the NLRB offices during a "mail-ballot" election, giving union representatives confidential election information, disenfranchising voters that did not cast in-person votes, and mishandling ballots.

“The purpose of this misconduct was to tip-the-scale in order to deliver the outcome sought by the Union," Starbucks general counsel stated in the letter. "The result of the misconduct was to ignore — and bypass — the actual sentiments that Starbucks partners may have expressed in properly conducted elections.”