Yesterday Region 3 of the NLRB, based in Buffalo, unveiled a sweeping complaint against Starbucks, the latest in a string of enforcement actions across the country the Board has taken against the coffee chain in recent months.  The latest complaint stems from a series of charges filed at several of the company’s New York locations.  It alleges that, among other things, the company surveilled employees, discriminatorily granted and withheld benefits, and retaliated against protected activities — including shuttering an Ithaca store last summer, the first location to close in the wake of an organizing drive. A hearing before an ALJ is scheduled for February 6, 2023.

On Tuesday the Ninth Circuit dismissed a yearslong class action challenging Target’s overtime pay practices. Initially filed in state court in 2015, the suit, which involved hundreds of employees, broadly alleged that the methodology the company used to calculate overtime ran afoul of California’s wage and hour laws. Target removed the case to federal court in 2016. And a Ninth Circuit panel, reversing the district court, entered summary judgment for the company this week, finding that, at bottom, the claims amounted to little more than an assertion that Target “should have adopted a payment methodology that maximized [the employees’] overtime pay.”

In the latest developments in the recent surge of independent unionization efforts, nearly 260 employees at a Home Depot retail store in Philadelphia will vote today on whether to joint Home Depot Workers United. The vote has the potential to be historic, as the employees could form the first collective bargaining unit at any of the company’s thousands of U.S. locations. And Trader Joe’s is set to begin negotiation with Trader Joe’s United later this week, for two recently organized stores: one in Hadley, MA, the first of the company’s locations to unionize, and the other in Minneapolis, MN, which followed suit two weeks later.