Starbucks continues to deploy unlawful tactics in an attempt to frustrate the organizing efforts unfolding at dozens of its cafes across the country. On Tuesday, the firm discharged seven members of a Memphis store’s bargaining committee, claiming they had violated company safety and security protocols. However, one of the dischargees, a shift supervisor, insists she had never heard of such policies, much less seen them enforced. The employees reportedly intend to file unfair labor practice charges with the Board in connection with the dismissals. The fact that even in such a high-profile context the existing labor law regime is evidently unable to deter a major employer from so blatantly disregarding its employees’ statutory rights to organize and join unions potently illustrates the law’s peripherality and underscores the necessity of legislative reform.

A bipartisan bill introduced in the U.S. Senate on Monday aims to eliminate forced labor overseas by obligating transnational corporations “to disclose the use of forced labor in their direct supply chain.” The legislation, sponsored by Senators Josh Hawley (R-MO) and Kristen Gillibrand (D-NY), would require that manufacturing and production firms audit their supply chains in order to uncover, and publicly disclose, any use of forced labor. Moreover, it prescribes hefty civil and punitive damages for those firms which fail to adhere to these requirements. Hawley, often identified as a leading ideological figure in the new school of purportedly populist, pro-worker Republicans, forcefully asserted in a press release that “the scourge of global slave labor must end and multinational corporations complicit in this moral atrocity must be held accountable.”

On the West Coast, the California legislature passed a bill on Monday requiring that most employers in the state provide up to two weeks of paid sick leave to their employees disabled from working by Covid. A state law affording a similar measure of leave expired in September 2021, and the updated legislation is retroactive to January 1, 2022. Governor Gavin Newsom (D) is expected to sign the bill into law in the coming days.