
Fred Wang is a student at Harvard Law School.
In today’s news and commentary, analysis on Starbucks’s “faux”-progressivism, waning worker leverage in the labor market, and what pharmacy work has to say about upper-middle-income work in general.
Amidst a wave of unionizing activity, Starbucks — long heralded as one of the rare “progressive” American corporations — is showing its true profit-first colors, Steven Greenhouse argues in a new piece at the American Prospect. Since the “earliest days” of the unionization campaign at Starbucks, Greenhouse recounts, the company “has taken a fierce approach toward stifling the union.” That strategy has involved closing unionized stores, firing unionizing workers, and offering pay raises (and abortion-travel benefits) only at nonunion stores.
It might be working. Greenhouse points to the dip in union petitions and victories over the past few months, citing data recently crunched by Matt Bruenig over at People’s Policy Project. Worse yet, U.S. labor law is ill equipped to stop Starbucks’s intimidation tactics. “A big problem with the NLRA,” Greenhouse explains, “is that it doesn’t allow for any fines against Starbucks or any other anti-union company, no matter how often they violate the law in seeking to quash unionization efforts.” Starbucks’s union-busting behavior just shows “how broken America’s labor laws are.”
American workers, in the past year, have enjoyed a position of historic strength over employers. “That golden age for workers,” Eleanor Mueller of Politico explains, “appears to be fading fast.” A “unique blend” of one-off “conditions that enabled employees to trade in their jobs for better ones” — rapidly reopening businesses and significant government COVID relief — are proving to be just that: unique and one-off. Employers are “posting fewer jobs, rescinding job offers[,] and hiring workers at a slower pace.” Unemployment insurance claims, meanwhile, are going up — as are the number of people working part time, “a reliable sign that more people were having difficulty finding full-time work.”
What this reveals, Professor David Weil remarked, is something we “have long known”: “[L]abor market power is tipped towards employers. That’s why labor and workplace laws and unions are essential.” Additional safety rails — such as a “robust child-care infrastructure,” Mueller notes — “would mitigate the cooling already underway,” in part by allowing more parents (especially women) to “fully participate in the workforce.”
The experience of pharmacists — a highly skilled and highly in-demand class of workers — might explain why pay growth amongst upper-middle-income workers generally has stalled, the New York Times’s Noam Scheiber covers. The very factors “that have weighed on other middle-class professions” have cooled the market for pharmacists too. Large corporations like Walgreens and CVS have acquired their competitors, “slow[ing] the growth of [hiring] retail outlets.” And automation has “further reduced demand for workers.”
The result has been pay stagnation, despite there being not enough workers to meet customer demand. Perhaps it’s a sign that more-affulent workers “are willing to accept lower wage growth” in exchange for being able to “work from home.” Or perhaps it’s evidence that workers are disempowered “at all levels of status.”
Daily News & Commentary
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February 7
In today’s News and Commentary, the NLRB withdraws its objections to SpaceX’s constitutional challenge, Whole Foods asks the NLRB to set aside a union election in Philadelphia, and the AFL-CIO launches a campaign to push back against Musk. The NLRB filed a letter with the Fifth Circuit indicating it would not address SpaceX’s challenge to […]
February 6
Gwynne Wilcox files lawsuit challenging her removal from the NLRB, and unions file a lawsuit challenging DOJE's request to access Department of Labor information.
February 5
Trump's disagreements with Abruzzo & Wilcox, Dollar General's plan for ICE agents, remote work in federal CBA's.
February 4
In today's news and commentary King Soopers workers announce a strike, Congressman Biggs introduces a bill to abolish OSHA, the UAW announces willingness to support Trump's tariffs, and Yale New Haven Health System faces a wage and hour class action.
February 2
President Trump seeks to nullify recent collective bargaining agreements with federal workers; Trump fired the NLRB’s acting General Counsel; Costco and the Teamsters reach a tentative deal averting a strike; Black History Month began yesterday with the theme African Americans and Labor
January 31
In today’s news and commentary, AFGE and AFSCME sue Trump for an Executive Order stripping protections from government employees, Trump fires members of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and Amazon shutters operations in the entirety of Quebec in response to union successes. On Wednesday, two unions representing government employees–American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) and […]