A Starbucks mermaid logo sign (left) is displayed on a store (AP Photo/Charles Krupa, Pool), (right) Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson (Patrick Semansky/AP)
In one of three opinions the U.S. Supreme Court dropped on Thursday, as the justices decided 8-1 that a National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) attempt to force Starbucks to reinstate fired unionizing baristas was wrongly decided in the courts below, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson stood alone in telling her colleagues to wake up and smell the coffee as to the potential implications when it comes to holding employers accountable for unfair labor practices down the line.
The majority opinion in Starbucks v. McKinney, authored by Justice Clarence Thomas and joined by seven other justices, agreed that the trial court and U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit should have applied a four-factor test when analyzing the NLRB’s “request for a preliminary injunction under §10 (j)” of the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) in the course of an “in-house” administrative enforcement action against Starbucks, rather than “a two-part test that asks whether ‘there is reasonable cause to believe that unfair labor practices have occurred.””
The NLRB, as Starbucks noted in its petition, in April 2022 responded to the firings of Memphis-based Starbucks employees, dubbed the “Memphis 7,” for alleged violations of the coffee giant’s policies by seeking an injunction and the reinstatement of the fired pro-union activists.
Starbucks said the those violations occurred in January 2022, when the “Memphis 7,” Nikki Taylor, Beto Sanchez, LaKota McGlawn, Nabretta Hardin, Florentino Escobar, Em Worrell, and Kylie Throckmorton, “invited a news crew to visit the Memphis store after hours to promote the unionization drive.”
“Starbucks thus terminated seven of the partners in the store without authorization,” the petition said.
But the lower courts decided to block Starbucks’s action pending the outcome of the case, at one point leading the company to relent on the firings.
On Thursday, the Supreme Court backed Starbucks, writing that the “traditional standard” for winning a preliminary injunction — the demonstration of likelihood of succeeding “on the merits” — is what should be applied in cases like this, not a “watered-down approach to equity” as seen in the “reasonable cause to believe that unfair labor practices have occurred” standard the lower courts credited.
For Jackson, this was a bridge too far because, in her view, the majority is “ignoring” congressional intent “about how courts should exercise their discretion in light of the National Labor Relations Board’s authority over labor disputes.”
Even though Jackson agreed that the “Memphis 7” case is subject to the “traditional four-factor test,” she slammed the majority for endorsing the “simplicity of unfettered judicial discretion over the nuances of Congress’s direction” on unfair labor practice matters.
“I am loath to bless this aggrandizement of judicial power where Congress has so plainly limited the discretion of the courts, and where it so clearly intends for the expert agency it has created to make the primary determinations about both merits and process,” Jackson concluded.
Workers United’s Lynne Fox, the president the labor union behind efforts to unionize at the Memphis store, said in a statement after the ruling that it was a “particularly egregious” confirmation that the “economy is rigged against working people all the way up to the Supreme Court.”
“Starbucks should have dropped this case the day it committed to chart a new path forward with its workers, instead of aligning itself with other giant corporations intent on stifling worker organizing,” Fox said.
According to the Washington Post, Starbucks, for its part, said through a spokesperson that it remains “committed to providing everyone who wears the green apron a bridge to a better future” but that “[c]onsistent federal standards are important in ensuring that employees know their rights and consistent labor practices are upheld no matter where in the country they work and live.”
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