New Orleans       Several years ago there seemed to a spurt of union organizing success in unusual places.  The results were impressive.  More than 500 Starbucks stores have organized.  Amazon workers in a Staten Island warehouse won an election.  Even REI coop retail workers won elections.  Spoiler alert.  This is the story of the dysfunctional way that existing law serves workers, as opposed to employers and their lawyers.  We don’t have a “labor board” as much as an attorney feeding and delay trough.  What happened to these great victories?  Way too many of them are stuck in endless delays at the bargaining table and court challenges dragging out the clock.

When I was on the West Coast, I thought I was hearing associates say there was finally an agreement at REI, which meant the boycott might end, and I could deal with the coop again.  I’d like to believe that the internet hasn’t caught up, but double-checking indicates that 11 stores have unionized since 2022, but after workers rejected a comprehensive offer in February, management implemented it’s last and best offer, which the union says cut wages, sick days, and more.  Ouch!

I talked to the chief union negotiator for Starbucks workers at Mardi Gras in 2025.  He was optimistic at the time, saying only wages seemed unresolved after the company had finally returned to the table.  It’s now fifteen months later in 2026, and there’s no agreement still and fewer and fewer reports about what’s happening and whether there’s any progress.   The independent Amazon Labor Union, now part of the Teamsters, also won its election in 2022, but there’s no contract there either, and I’m not sure if there’s any bargaining at this point.  Amazon has initiated constant legal challenges at the NLRB level and, losing there, in federal courts.  Locally, the National Nurses Union won an election two-and-a-half years ago in a breakthrough in New Orleans, but after five strikes, still nothing.

There are two messages here.  Workers want unions.  Companies don’t, and the odds are stacked on their side.  The legalistic NLRB regime favors employers to such a degree that there’s almost never a successful resolution, despite collective bargaining ostensibly being public policy.  Maybe there’s an outside chance of some help.  The anti-worker editorial page of The Wall Street Journal signaled its concern by trying to taint some Republican representatives as part of the union GOP, when they crossed the aisle to join Democrats on a current piece of legislation, noting that “The Faster Labor Contracts Act has been sent around a committee to the US House, which would mandate government arbitration, if companies don’t reach agreements on an approved timeline from when unions are certified.”

It would be best to solve this power imbalance on the front end at the point of organizing, but fixing on the backend would solve the situations we see with Starbucks, Amazon, REI, and countless other companies.  There is mandatory arbitration in the Railways Act and within some of the regimes under the federal employees’ labor laws.  Furthermore, despite the editorial and management concerns, the country has survived and capitalism has chugged on in extraordinary health.  Of, course, Congress and the administration would really want to fix this huge issue for workers and unions, and that’s a bet that would be hard to take.