From Daily Kos: Labor board charges Starbucks with another big labor law violation, this week in the war on workers
By LAURA CLAWSON
The National Labor Relations Board has issued yet another complaint against Starbucks for breaking labor laws as it attempts to break its workers’ will to organize and fight for better working conditions and more respect in the workplace.
This is far from the first NLRB charge against Starbucks, with many focusing on the company’s pattern of obvious retaliatory firings of union activists. In this case, though, the issue is that Starbucks responded to the unionization wave at stores across the country by announcing pay and benefit increases for workers only at non-union stores. Company management claimed they couldn’t extend the increases to union workers unilaterally—but then refused to give those workers a raise after the union said it would be just fine. It’s an obvious union-busting tactic: “You get a raise if you don’t get a union,” but Starbucks somehow expected it to fly.