“The inherent danger in well-timed increases in benefits is the suggestion of a fist inside the velvet glove.”
That’s the 5th Circuit, describing what Starbucks did to its Buffalo stores once a union showed up. The court’s recent opinion in Starbucks Corp. v. NLRB reads like a playbook of exactly what not to do during an organizing campaign.
Here’s what happened. In August 2021, employees at Starbucks’s Buffalo stores posted an open letter to the CEO announcing a union drive. Within a week, Starbucks flew in a team of senior executives who had never set foot in a Buffalo store before, and parachuted in district managers from other regions to serve as “support managers” — something it had never done there. The day after that letter went public, Starbucks fired the district manager overseeing two of the affected stores.
Repairs that normally took 12 to 18 months of advance notice suddenly got done in weeks. Seniority pay expanded. A national wage increase got moved up. Managers started wearing headsets to monitor conversations they’d never bothered monitoring before. And after the union won at eight stores but narrowly lost at a ninth, Starbucks kept enforcing rules unevenly, then fired six employees for conduct it had tolerated from everyone else for years.
All told, the Board found 125 violations across 60 different ways of breaking the law, and the 5th Circuit affirmed most of them.
The legal rule is simple. A benefit granted, or a rule enforced, isn’t illegal on its own. Timed to a union campaign, however, with no explanation for why it never happened before, it’s evidence of exactly what an employer isn’t allowed to say out loud — “Vote no, or else!”
Here’s what Starbucks should have done differently, and you should, too, if a union comes knocking on your door.
1. Fix problems on your normal schedule. If your stores had “widespread facilities issues” for years, suddenly finding the money and the urgency the week cards start circulating doesn’t read as generosity. It reads as a bribe.
2. Avoid conferring unexpected benefits. Speeding up a wage increase, expanding seniority pay, and adding hours look generous. Benefits timed to a union campaign, with no explanation for why they couldn’t have waited, looks like a quid pro quo for a “no” vote.
3. Don’t flood the zone with strangers. Sending in executives and out-of-town managers who’ve never been there before, the moment organizing starts, creates the impression of surveillance even if you call it operational support.
4. Discipline consistently, or don’t discipline at all. If tardiness, dress code, and other violations were tolerated for years and suddenly become fireable offenses the same month a petition gets filed, that inconsistency is the union’s best exhibit.
The velvet may fool some of the organizing employees. It never, however, fools the Board.
