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 IBT.

In litigation news, the Ninth Circuit dismissed an employee class action challenging Target’s pay practices on Tuesday. The complaint, which was initially filed in a state court in 2015, alleged that the firm’s method of calculating overtime ran afoul of California’s wage and hour laws. Target removed the case to federal court in 2016, and on Tuesday a Ninth Circuit panel reversed the district court to grant summary judgment in favor of the company. In the panel’s view, the plaintiffs’ claims ultimately amounted to little more than an assertion that Target “should have adopted a payment methodology that maximized [the employees’] overtime pay.” California law, the judges concluded, “does not require that outcome.”

NLRB Region 3 brought a sweeping complaint against Starbucks yesterday, adding to a sizable stockpile the firm has accrued in recent months. The complaint predicated on a series of unfair labor practice charges filed against the company across its New York locations, which allege that it, inter alia, improperly surveilled employees, granted and withheld benefits, and retaliated against protected activities, including by permanently shuttering a store last summer, the first to suffer such fate in response to unionization.

In the latest in a recent surge of independent unionization efforts, employees at a Home Depot in Philadelphia will decide today whether to select Home Depot Workers United as their bargaining representative. Doing so would form the company’s first union. The election petition was filed in September and the prospective unit includes nearly 260 employees. Results are expected to be released on Saturday. In other independent union news, Trader Joe’s is set to begin negotiating a collective bargaining agreement with Trader Joe’s United to cover two locations: one in Hadley, Massachusetts, the first Trader Joe’s store to unionize, and the other in Minneapolis, which followed suit  two weeks later.

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