Pearl River      I don’t know Matt Bruenig, but I know his work.  He’s a labor lawyer who birddogs the proceedings, filings, and decisions of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB).  One of our organizers tipped me off about his newsletter the NLRB Edge, which I look at regularly, because it’s a fount of information.  Because of that, I had an early notice that he was having an op-ed published in the New York Times about the seminal Starbucks campaign and its impact on the NLRB.  The piece, both directly and indirectly, is a devastating indictment of the sorry state of US labor law, it’s administrative apparatus, and the successful conservative and corporate project of creating the “shallow” state.

This was a classic good news / bad news report.  The good news has been the ability of Starbucks baristas and staff with the help of Workers United/SEIU to win almost 500 elections for 11,000 people over the last three years.  Atypically for modern labor organizing, they have pursed an NLRB election strategy to achieve these results rather than using leverage of existing contracts, political relationships, direct action, and collective union solidarity in certain US markets, which has been the dominant mass organizing program in recent decades, given the dysfunction of labor law.

The bad news is that Starbucks has met the organizing with an equally classic strategy of gumming up the works.  The NLRB under the Biden administration has answered the company toe to toe.  As Bruenig documents,

With an overall budget of $299 million and a staff of around 1,200, the N.L.R.B. has conducted over 550 union elections, processed more than 1,000 unfair labor practice charges and issued roughly 300 decisions in cases involving the company.  N.L.R.B. lawyers have also filed for 12 preliminary injunctions against Starbucks, the company accounting for more than 40 percent of all the injunctions the agency sought last year.  The agency’s legal documents in Starbucks cases comprised at least 2.7 million words … not counting hearing transcripts, complaints, motions and briefs that … would at least double that figure.

This huge effort by the NLRB to meet Starbucks tactics have also meant that much of the rest of the agency’s business is stuck in the swamp.  Bruenig reports there is 50% delay in all NLRB cases.  It may be worse than that.  Our own local union has had a simple successor ship case with a healthcare company, Savita, still “pending” in the works at the regional office for two years.

In welfare rights organizing, Dick Cloward and Fran Piven famously argued for a “breaking the bank” strategy in the 1960s.  The theory was that if we could enroll as many eligible recipients as possible for their entitlements, it would force the governments to change the program and create something akin to a guaranteed benefit.  Starbucks’ strategy has broken the bank in its own way, but once again the result is not reform, but a breakdown with no signs of a fix.  With annual revenue of $36 billion, Starbucks dwarfs the NLRB resources at hardly one-hundredth of a percent of those corporate resources.

It is inconceivable that a Republican Congress will increase the budget of the NLRB sufficiently to make the agency able to expeditiously handle mass organizing drives, if and when the labor movement might launch such initiatives.  In fact, Congress has been starving the agency, and allowed its budget to fall behind inflation.  Even if they did provide more resources, the law itself remains a toothless barrier.  Starbucks and the one successfully organized Amazon warehouse are both still trying for a first contract, years after workers voted for the union.  Corporate America is sending a message to American workers that is impossible to miss, that the law and the NLRB don’t work when it comes to their rights and aspirations.

As we celebrate Labor Day, another one comes and goes, leaving workers desperate for a solution with none in sight.