Cleveland        SEIU’s Workers United has now won more than 700 elections covering 15,000 workers at Starbucks coffeehouses around the United States over the last four years or so.  There has been no recent news indicating any progress in collective bargaining between the union and the company for more than a year to my reckoning.  When I happened to have the opportunity to talk about this situation over Mardi Gras 2025, there seemed optimism that the gap between the parties was narrowing, though stuck on economics.  New company leadership seems to have once again altered the bargaining environment creating what seems like a stalemate.  The union keeps winning elections, although not at the earlier pace, but to outsiders there seems to be little or no current progress.

At this point the only clear winners seem to the management side lawyers being paid by Starbucks to drag this situation out in every conceivable way possible by clogging up the National Labor Relations Board and drowning the union in legal costs, while hoping to discourage the workers.  Matt Bruenig, a lawyer who manages the NLRB Edge email list keeps a database on NLRB decisions and activity.  Recently, he took another look at the sheer volume of legal filings Starbucks has generated at the NLRB in resisting the union.

The numbers are staggering.

• 16,077 unique legal documents were counted, more than one for every worker organized
• On the NLRB posted website, his database currently found 6,405 documents containing 43.7 million words
• 370 legal decisions, including one from the Supreme Court. This is one legal decision for every 41 unionized workers.
• lawyers from the notorious anti-union law firm Littler Mendelson have filed nearly 6,700 appearances in Starbucks cases, making untold millions. One individual Littler attorney has notched 400 times.

Not surprisingly, Bruenig notes that all of these machinations by Starbucks and its lawyers is proof positive that the federal labor relations system is broken to the benefit of companies resisting the stated public policy of the country in favor of collective bargaining.  In an earlier piece, he had estimated how this paperwork war had monopolized NLRB resources to the extent that other cases were invariably delayed because more than half of the staff and budget of the agency was now dedicated to endless Starbucks wrangling.

Needless to say, even with staff attorneys and a legal department within SEIU and likely Workers United the cost to the unions also is in the millions internally.  With elections and Board proceedings happening all over the country, most worker-generated and without union staff on the scene, that also means that in many cases the unions had to pay local or area labor-side lawyers to make appearances to defend the union’s position, adding to even more millions. Money spent on lawyers can’t be spent on organizers and organizing, which might make the company and its allies happy, but does nothing for workers, just as overwhelming the NLRB itself denies justice to other workers as well.

It’s not clear that anyone elected or in government really cares, but for workers and unions these organizing victories now count in bargaining and legal hell as tragedy moving to farce.