Whisteblowers reportedly intend to file a complaint with the DOL alleging that the thousands of workers building Tesla’s massive “gigafactory” in Austin, Texas have been subjected to unlawful pay practices and unsafe working conditions. The complaint is predicated on claims of wage theft, safety hazards and injuries, and fraudulent OSHA certificates. Tesla selected Austin as the site of its new facility in July 2020, after the city agreed to confer tens of millions of dollars in tax breaks on the firm. It broke ground on the sprawling compound later that month, which is slated to be one of the largest vehicle manufacturing facilities in the country. Allegations of unlawful pay practices and unsafe working conditions are far from new for the electric vehicle manufacturer.

It remains difficult to predict whether rail employees will approve the tentative agreement their unions secured, with help from the Biden administration, from the nation’s largest freight rail operators. “It’s on a razor’s edge,” remarked the president of one of the major rail unions. “It’s going to be tight.” More than half the workers have yet to ratify the contracts, and as the two largest rail unions head to the polls on Monday, a movement has metastasized to reject them. The message urging rejection appears to be resonating with a sizable segment of the frustrated workers, many of whom view the compromise as insufficient to redress their grievances or improve their working conditions. The rail workers would be empowered to strike if they reject the agreement, a move which many policymakers fear would further strain the nation’s supply chain. A desire to forestall such an outcome may provoke Congress to intervene and extend the “cooling-off” period during which rail employees are precluded from striking. Congress may even statutorily impose the tentative agreement on the workers.

The management-side law firm Littler Mendelson published an article yesterday exploring the implications of the midterm elections with respect to national labor and employment policy. The article, which presupposes the GOP will win a House majority (something that, as of this writing, remains unsettled), predicts that a Republican majority in that chamber “will make labor, employment, and workforce development policy issues a key focus of its domestic policy agenda.” With that in mind, the firm spotlights several of the Republicans’ pro-employer legislative priorities, including such initiatives as the Employee Rights Act, which would entrench secret ballot elections, mandate union recertification votes if membership dips below fifty percent, and require employees to affirmatively authorize union political spending; the Ensuring Workers Get PAID Act, which would permit employers to self-report minimum wage and overtime violations as an alternative to litigation; and the Working Families Flexibility Act, which would authorizes time off as compensation for overtime rather than premium pay. Moreover, given the congressional impasse, the writers predict that the Biden administration, for its part, will turn to the federal regulatory apparatus to implement its labor and employment agenda.

In the latest Starbucks news, the firm allegedly intends to shutter another unionized store, this one located in Portland, Maine. Employees at the facility voted to unionize a few weeks ago, and Starbucks Workers United announced that management plans to close the location next month. The closure, in the words of the Maine AFL-CIO president, amounts to “illegal union busting” and a “blatant violation of the right of workers to unionize free from retaliation.” Such contentions are far from frivolous, for the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that shuttering a portion of an enterprise may run afoul of the NLRA if the underlying objective is to discourage organizing in the employer’s remaining facilities. Indeed, consistent with this doctrine, the NLRB recently filed a sweeping complaint against Starbucks charging, among other things, that the company has unlawfully retaliated against union activity by closing several stores in New York, as I detailed earlier this month.

In local news, the owners of Darwin’s, a small coffee chain that has become a staple for many of Harvard’s coffee afficionados, announced that they intend to shutter all four of the firm’s Cambridge locations. The news has unsettling labor relations overtones in view of the ongoing organizing efforts the company has experienced since last year. In an email to the Boston Globe, in fact, one of the chain’s owners candidly acknowledged that the organizing activities had accelerated their decision to discontinue the enterprise. Although a partial retaliatory closure may constitute an unfair labor practice, the Court has held that the NLRA does not preclude an employer from entirely closing its business, even for antiunion purposes. Nevertheless, the Darwins are legally obliged to negotiate with the union concerning the effects of the closure. They have espoused a commitment to do so.