US supreme court justices on Tuesday appeared to agree with Starbucks in the coffee chain’s challenge to a judicial order requiring it to rehire seven employees at a Tennessee cafe who were fired as they pursued efforts to unionize.
The justices heard arguments in the company’s appeal of a lower court’s approval of an injunction sought by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) ordering the reinstatement of the workers. It is a case that could make it harder to bring a quick halt to labor practices challenged as unfair under federal law while the NLRB resolves complaints.
The case centers on the legal standard that federal courts must use to issue a preliminary injunction requested by the NLRB under the a federal law called the National Labor Relations Act.
Such orders are intended as an interim tool to halt unfair labor practices while a case is proceeding before the board.
Under section 10(j) of the labor law, a court may grant an injunction if it is deemed “just and proper” Starbucks contends that if the lower courts had applied stricter criteria, similar to the standard used by some other courts and in non-labor legal disputes, the case would have come out differently.
Some justices appeared to agree that courts should have the primary role in determining a “likelihood of success” in the case before issuing an injunction.
The conservative justice Neil Gorsuch told the justice department lawyer Austin Raynor, who was defending the injunction against Starbucks, that other federal agencies were subject to the stricter standard.
“In all sorts of alphabet soup agencies, we don’t do this. District courts apply the ‘likelihood of success’ test as we normally conceive it. So why is this particular statutory regime different than so many others?” Gorsuch asked.
Raynor told the justices that the NLRB seeks this kind of injunction only in “the cream-of-the-crop cases”.
“The board receives 20,000 unfair labor charges every year. It issues 750 complaints. Last year, it authorized 14 petitions and filed seven. That’s seven out of 20,000,” Raynor said.
“This is an expert agency that has said, ‘We think these are the most deserving of relief,’” Raynor added.
But the conservative chief justice, John Roberts, said that “I don’t know why the inference isn’t the exact opposite.” Roberts said these could be the cases that the board feels “are the most vulnerable”.
The liberal justice Ketanji Brown Jackson told Lisa Blatt, the lawyer arguing for Starbucks, that the agency had sought this type of injunction “in a very, very small number of cases”.
“This is not sounding like a huge problem,” Jackson said.
About 400 Starbucks locations in the United States have unionized, involving more than 10,000 employees. Both sides at times have accused the other of unlawful or improper conduct.
Hundreds of complaints have been filed with the NLRB accusing Starbucks of unlawful labor practices such as firing union supporters, spying on workers and closing stores during labor campaigns. Starbucks has denied wrongdoing and said it respects the right of workers to choose whether to unionize.
In a break from the acrimony, both sides in February said they had agreed to create a “framework” to guide organizing and collective bargaining and potentially settle scores of pending legal disputes.
The case began in 2022, when the workers at the Poplar Avenue store in Memphis became among the first to unionize. Early in their efforts, they allowed a television news crew into the Starbucks cafe after hours to talk about the union campaign. Seven workers present that evening were fired, including several who belonged to the union organizing committee.
Despite the dismissals, employees there later voted to join Workers United.
The supreme court’s ruling is expected by the end of June.
