Several dozen former and current players on the U.S. women’s national soccer team,  the reigning world champions, entered into a $24 million agreement with the U.S. Soccer Federation on Tuesday, settling a bitter legal battle over gender discrimination allegations that had simmered for years.

The players filed a federal lawsuit in 2019 alleging that the Federation’s disparate pay practices violated federal law, namely the Equal Pay Act and Title VII. The district judge dismissed the suit the following year, finding that the players’ evidence was “insufficient to establish a genuine dispute that WNT players are paid at a rate less than the rate paid to MNT players.” Although the dismissal stripped much of their legal leverage, the players managed to secure millions in backpay and, perhaps more importantly, the core relief they sought: a pledge from U.S. Soccer to equalize pay between the men’s and women’s teams.

The historic rerun union election unfolding at the Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama began barely three weeks ago, yet the union has already filed a string of charges alleging, among other things, the company removed union literature from breakrooms, restricted employee access to the facility, and compelled attendance at captive audience meetings.

The third charge is interesting. The Board considered captive audience meetings unlawfully coercive in its early years but pivoted sharply in the wake of Taft-Hartley. In the decades since the tactic has crystallized into a hallmark of the modern employer’s highly sophisticated antiunion playbook. In its charge, RWDSU, the independent union attempting to organize Amazon’s Bessemer facility, is inviting the Board to revisit this doctrine.

In the latest on the “Starbucks unionization wildfire” blazing across the nation, a unit in Phoenix, Arizona that began organizing last month filed several charges yesterday alleging that management has been unlawfully surveilling and disciplining union supporters. As Kevin observed over the weekend, organizing efforts have now erupted at more than one hundred Starbucks locations nationwide. The company has responded by shelling out of millions of dollars to antiunion law firms and, as the allegations in Phoenix reflect, systematically transgressing federal labor law.