News & Commentary

November 2, 2022

Jason Vazquez

Jason Vazquez is a staff attorney at the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. He graduated from Harvard Law School in 2023. His writing on this blog reflects his personal views and should not be attributed to the Teamsters.

Region 3 of the NLRB unveiled a sweeping complaint against Starbucks yesterday, the latest in a string of complaints the Labor Board has issued against the coffee chain in recent months.

Stemming from a series of ULP charges filed at several of the company’s New York locations, the complaint alleges that, among other things, the company improperly surveilled employees, discriminatorily granted and withheld benefits to discourage unionization, and unlawfully retaliated against protected activities, including shuttering a store last summer, which was the first Starbucks location to close after a union drive. A hearing on the charges is set for Feb. 6, 2023.

On Tuesday, the Ninth Circuit dismissed of a yearslong class action challenges Target’s overtime pay practices. The suit, initially filed in California state court in 2015, broadly alleged that the company’s methodology for calculating overtime was inconsistent with California’s wage and hour laws. Target removed the case to federal court in 2016 and a Ninth Circuit panel, reversing the district court, granted summary judgment to the company in a succinct ruling.

The panel found that, at bottom, the plaintiffs’ claims amounted to little more than an assertion that Target “should have adopted a payment methodology that maximized [the employees’] overtime pay.” Such a demand for maximal pay is not a cognizable legal claim, the court concluded.

In the latest development in the recent surge of independent unionization efforts, nearly 260 employees at a Home Depot store in Philadelphia will vote today on whether to joint Home Depot Workers United. Should they prevail, the employees will form the first union at any of the company’s more than 2,000 U.S. stores. In other independent union news, Trader Joe’s is set to begin negotiations with Trader Joe’s United for two recently unionized locations, one in Hadley, MA — the first TJ’s location to unionize — and the other in Minneapolis, MN, which followed suit two weeks later.

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