[Bargaining-table negotiations over a first contract are never
easy, but now they’re becoming excruciatingly slow and difficult.
For companies like Trader Joe’s, that’s the goal.]
[[link removed]]

HOW CORPORATIONS CRUSH NEW UNIONS  
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Steven Greenhouse
December 18, 2023
The New Republic
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_ Bargaining-table negotiations over a first contract are never easy,
but now they’re becoming excruciatingly slow and difficult. For
companies like Trader Joe’s, that’s the goal. _

, Illustration by Alex Nabaum

 

The spacious second-floor conference room at Smith College in
Northampton, Massachusetts, was an unlikely place for labor and
management to face off, but there they were: eight Trader Joe’s
workers at one row of tables, a Trader Joe’s official and two
lawyers for the company at another. On the walls hung student
paintings of brilliant, swirling flowers. They did little to cheer the
atmosphere.

Three months earlier, in July 2022, employees at a Trader Joe’s in
Hadley, four miles from Smith, had voted
[[link removed]]
to become the nation’s first unionized TJ’s, and now they were
finally—and nervously—plunging into the bargaining process, in the
hope of winning higher pay, better retirement benefits, and safer
working conditions. Outside the conference center, several pro-union
students carried signs saying “RESPECT WORKERS.” Inside, the
workers turned negotiators admittedly felt uncomfortable; unlike the
company’s high-paid Morgan Lewis attorneys, they were rookies at
collective bargaining.

The union members opened the discussion. They complained about low
pay, about the company moving too slowly to deal with employees who
harassed co-workers, about a manager who used hourly workers to serve
as “human shields” when confronting troublesome customers. Sarah
Beth Ryther, who works in Minneapolis at the nation’s second
unionized Trader Joe’s, described management’s “deep and
insidious” disrespect toward the union. Managers, she said, boasted
of Trader Joe’s as a “golden place to work” and belittled the
union by asking over and over why people were complaining. “The ugly
subtext of this question is, ‘Who are we to want more, who are we to
dream of a better life?’”

As Ryther spoke, tensions grew. She criticized a manager for writing
up a single mother who had arrived late to her shift because of
complications caring for her 2-year-old. She talked of a co-worker who
was injured when one of the store’s ceiling tiles fell on his head.

Ultimately, “a Morgan Lewis lawyer called me emotional,” Ryther
said in an interview. The accusation may have been “sexist,” she
continued, but it was true. “Why wouldn’t we be emotional when
we’re talking about our livelihoods? They say we don’t understand
what we’re doing, that our concerns and our values are not in line
with something Trader Joe’s would ever agree to, and that what
we’re saying is preposterous. That has been the general attitude
from day one.”

Increasing the workers’ ire, the TJ’s representatives put forward
no contract proposals.

That first negotiating session was more than a year ago, and TJ’s
workers told me they feel hardly any closer to reaching a first
contract today than they did then. The workers maintained that Trader
Joe’s lawyers—who they say make $800 or $1,000 an hour—are
condescending at best. When their independent union, Trader Joe’s
United, proposed a $30 starting wage—not just a living wage, the
workers said, but a wage to enable them to thrive, to enjoy bread and
roses too, as the saying goes—the company’s negotiators “laughed
at us,” Ryther said.

It’s absurd, the workers contend, that in the nearly a year and a
half since the first TJ’s unionized, the two sides still haven’t
reached agreement on even one economic issue, such as minimum hourly
pay or the number of paid sick days. “We feel strongly that
they’re not bargaining in good faith,” said Maeg Yosef, a worker
in the Hadley store. “They’re absolutely trying to wear us
down.”

Yosef, Ryther, and several other TJ’s workers have devoted dozens of
unpaid hours to preparing for and attending bargaining
sessions—hours they could have spent with their loved ones or
pursuing their artistic interests or on the job earning money. At
times during the eight-hour negotiating sessions, progress was so
slow, and there was so much protracted debate about minuscule points
that they felt like screaming. “It’s absolutely exhausting,”
Ryther told me. “My brain is fried afterward.”

These Trader Joe’s employees have discovered what the workers who
unionized Starbucks, Amazon, Apple, and REI facilities over the past
two years have also discovered: When nonunion workers are eager to get
a union contract, they have to climb not just one but two often
forbidding mountains. First, they must win a unionization drive,
frequently against a fiercely anti-union company; and second, often
harder and taking far longer, they need to clinch a first contract.

Climbing this second mountain is much harder than many workers
realize. The first Starbucks store unionized in December 2021
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(in Buffalo, New York); the first REI store in March 2022
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(in Manhattan); the first Amazon warehouse in April 2022
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(on Staten Island); the first Apple Store in June 2022
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(in Towson, Maryland). Yet workers from all four companies, much like
Trader Joe’s workers, say a first contract remains miles away.

The research confirms they are not alone. In a 2009 study of five
years of union elections across the United States, Kate
Bronfenbrenner, director of labor education research at Cornell
University, found [[link removed]] that
slightly more than half of unionized workplaces (52 percent) didn’t
reach a contract within a year of first unionizing. More than
one-third (37 percent) had no contract after two years, and 30 percent
still had no contract after three years.

Over the decades, the delays have gotten dramatically worse. A recent
survey by Bloomberg Law found that between 2005 and 2007, the average
or mean amount of time it took to reach a first contract after
unionizing was 364 days; by 2022, it had climbed to 565 days.

“The short answer is that it’s getting longer to reach a first
contract,” said John-Paul Ferguson, a professor of management at
Montreal’s McGill University who did a pioneering study
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numerous reasons for this. Many companies “have an entire new
generation of managers who have no experience of collective
bargaining,” Ferguson pointed out. And, Ferguson and other labor
relations experts say, management-side law firms like Morgan Lewis
have gotten far more adept at dragging out the process. Adding to the
delays is the resistance from high-profile corporate leaders
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such as Jeff Bezos at Amazon and Howard Schultz at Starbucks, who
resent the ways a union contract—by giving workers a voice and
written rules about how the company is run—would limit
management’s autonomy.

But perhaps most important is the fact that corporations have huge
incentives to avoid agreeing to a first contract, said John Logan,
chair of the labor studies department at San Francisco State
University. “Many companies have for years taken the position that
losing a unionization election is just round one, and they haven’t
really lost until they sign a contract,” said Logan, one of the
nation’s leading academic experts on what corporate America calls
“union-avoidance” strategies. “They want to send a signal to
workers who are thinking of unionizing that even if you win a
unionization election, you’re not going to win.”

As workers at these newly unionized companies watch negotiations drag
on month after month, they’ve also seen long-established unions at
UPS
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Ford
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General Motors
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Kaiser Permanente
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and other employers win impressive contracts with hefty raises.
Unfortunately, there are few options available for workers facing a
company’s refusal to bargain in good faith. “There’s essentially
nothing under labor law that forces employers to bargain,”
Bronfenbrenner said, “and the penalties … are usually just a
posting on the bulletin board … For employers, that is less than a
slap on the wrist.” Logan agreed. “The incentives not to
negotiate, not to engage in real good-faith bargaining, are just too
great, because reaching a good contract will obviously provide
enormous incentives for workers in their nonunion stores to
organize.” 

 
 
As a student at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, Yosef eagerly
seized the opportunity to design her own major, a mixture of visual
art, writing, social justice, and education. While at UMass, she
worked at the student-run grocery cooperative, and after graduation,
because of that experience, she thought it made sense to apply at a
nearby Trader Joe’s. The job, she figured, would help her make ends
meet while pursuing her artistic interests. Thin and muscular, with a
big smile and long, dirty-blonde hair sometimes done in a bold
comb-over, Yosef joined the team of artists at her store and went on
to make many of its customized signs.

She enjoyed working there. “I love the people I work with,” she
told me. “I like the physical work. I like talking to customers.”
But over time, she said, she became “increasingly disillusioned.”
Yosef and many coworkers grew upset that TJ’s was gradually cutting
benefits, and they became especially upset when they learned that the
company was cutting its contributions to employee 401(k)s “from a
guaranteed 10 percent [of pay] to you don’t know what they’ll
be.”

Their dismay—coupled with the news of historic union victories
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at Starbucks and Amazon—spurred Yosef and several courageous
co-workers to launch the union drive in Hadley. But just as Starbucks
and Amazon did, Trader Joe’s mounted an intensive anti-union effort.

“There was so much misinformation and fearmongering from
management,” Yosef remembered. “There were one-on-one
conversations between managers and crew members who were pulled
outside to a picnic table. They said, ‘Do you know you won’t get a
raise until you get a contract? You won’t get a 401(k) contribution
until you get a first contract.’ Some of these things really
unsettled people.”

If the Hadley workers were enthusiastic about unionizing, they felt
trepidation, too. They reassured themselves by talking about how they
were “stronger together,” Yosef said. “They can’t fire us all
if we stick together.”

On July 28, 2022, the Hadley workers voted
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45 to 31 to unionize.

Ryther pursued a similar course. A native of St. Paul, she took a job
at a Trader Joe’s in Minneapolis after getting a master’s in fine
arts at the University of California, Irvine. “I heard that Trader
Joe’s was a great place to work for people who are creative,” said
the dark-haired, personable 33-year-old, who had won a creative
writing prize and an accompanying grant to help write a novel.

“It was immediately the craziest place I ever worked,” she told
me. There were safety problems (workers sometimes got injured lifting
things), nasty spats with managers, and a co-worker who sexually
harassed several female employees. “There was an individual with a
gunshot wound in the head who walked into the store one day, and I was
the first responder,” Ryther said. “They didn’t even close the
store. That galvanized me personally.”

Explaining why so many workers pulled together to form a union, she
said, “Here was a community of workers that wanted to make their
daily life better, and again and again, we came up against every
single thing you can think of that makes our lives as low-wage workers
difficult.”

On August 12, 2022, the Minneapolis workers also voted
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to unionize. It was a 55–5 landslide.

When negotiations with TJ’s finally began, Yosef and Ryther quickly
saw that the going would be slow. The members of Trader Joe’s United
called for minimum hourly pay of $30, a guaranteed percentage
contribution toward their 401(k)s, more paid time off, fewer obstacles
to qualifying for health coverage, and protections from getting kicked
off coverage when a worker’s weekly hours were cut. The two sides
reached tentative agreements on several minor issues like jury duty,
“but we didn’t have a lot of movement on issues that were
important to crew members,” Yosef said.

TJ’s counteroffer on health insurance was particularly infuriating.
“They wanted to give us a lump sum so that we could each
individually search for health care in the open market, making it as
difficult as possible for us to get health coverage,” Ryther said.
“Every single thing they have proposed has been to make it as
unsavory as possible to be in a unionized store.”

Trader Joe’s did not respond to four emails I sent with questions
about the contract talks. In communications with employees on the
company’s internal mytraderjoes.com site, the company has said
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it “remains committed to treating all of its Crew Members fairly and
bargaining in good faith.”

Ryther argued, however, that Trader Joe’s was impeding progress by
not sending an executive knowledgeable about store operations to the
bargaining sessions. As an example, she described a common issue at
her Minneapolis store. Drug addicts often enter, raising fears among
employees of people collapsing inside from overdoses. Workers argued
that their contract needed to include safety protocols and training
requirements so that workers know how to use Narcan, an opioid
overdose treatment. TJ’s negotiators didn’t understand that need,
Ryther said.

The workers also complained about the lawyers’ tactics and
theatrics. At times, the two sides would of course differ about
proposals, and then, the workers said, the Morgan Lewis lawyers often
walked out to caucus. “We would spend hours and hours over
minutiae,” Ryther said, “and there would be hours and hours where
the Morgan Lewis lawyers would refuse to enter the room about some
small issue.”

Between November 2022 and April 2023, the two sides held around 10
negotiating sessions, but from April to October, TJ’s declined to
hold any bargaining sessions if the union insisted on letting workers
join over Zoom, a condition the union felt strongly about because some
TJ’s workers didn’t have the time or money to attend sessions.
Some sessions were held in Hadley, some in Minneapolis, and one was
held in Oakland, California, where workers at a TJ’s voted
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75 to 53 to unionize in April 2023.

The disparate locations meant that workers who frequently make less
than $600 a week sometimes had to pay out of their own pockets to fly
to negotiations in other states. “Initially, I paid a lot on my own
credit card,” Yosef said. In recent months, the TJ’s workers have
gotten several unions and outside groups to help finance their travel.
Nonetheless, the workers told me they feel stretched thin by all the
time and money spent and all the paid working hours forgone to
participate in the bargaining.

This, too, is a tactic: Labor experts say companies often seek to
frustrate and wear down union negotiators to such a degree that
workers, in order to finally bring excruciatingly long negotiations to
a close, end up settling for considerably less than they had
originally sought.

Yosef described, for instance, exasperating months of debate with
TJ’s over whether workers could wear a pronoun pin bigger than one
inch in diameter. She was annoyed that the company had sued the union
for trademark infringement for selling union buttons, bags, and mugs
that have the retailer’s name on them. “This seems frivolous,”
Yosef said. “It takes up a lot of time and energy to deal with
that.”

“They are a multibillion company, and we’re a scrappy young
union,” she added. “They’re absolutely trying to wear us down
and deplete our resources.”

 
 
Anti-union companies often have an ulterior motive in dragging out
negotiations: They know that once a full year elapses after workers
first vote to unionize, workers can petition to decertify (or vote
out) the union. A corporation’s lawyers are certainly aware that if
a new union fails within a year to reach a first contract that
delivers better pay and benefits, frustrated workers may start pushing
to decertify.

Whether or not Starbucks and its lawyers have decertification in mind,
the company has moved with spectacular slowness and, like Trader
Joe’s, resisted bargaining over Zoom. For nearly two years, the
company failed to make a single counterproposal to the union’s many
proposals. For nearly a year and a half, it also failed to put forth
any of its own proposals.

Until recently, Liz Duran was a barista at one of Starbucks’s
flagship operations, the sprawling Reserve Roastery in Seattle, the
company’s hometown, but she was suddenly fired in late October—a
move she believes was illegal retaliation for her outspoken pro-union
activities. When Duran was hired by the roastery two years ago, she
wasn’t thinking about labor unions; she was focused on succeeding in
the restaurant industry. “I liked a lot of things about the company,
and I quickly fell in love with the place,” she told me. The
roastery, with its gleaming metal pipes and large, hand-hammered
copper cask, is in a handsome building dating from the 1920s.

Duran was only passingly involved in the early efforts to unionize the
roastery. But she eventually grew so angry about what managers were
telling baristas at the company’s captive-audience meetings that she
plunged in.

“They were just lying to us, misinforming us,” she said. “They
told people: ‘Oh, you know there’s a chance you could lose your
benefits, you might not be able to have health care, they could take
away your college benefits if you unionize.’ That scared a lot of
people. That’s bad faith for them to threaten to take away things we
already have.”

Incensed about Starbucks’s union-busting efforts, Duran—whose
mother and father long belonged to unions in their jobs working for
Washington’s state government—“went into high gear,” she said.
“I tried to reassure people.”

Sometimes, Duran recounted, managers tried to intimidate workers. “I
had a manager say, ‘You’re going up against a multibillion
company. You’re just a handful of baristas. What do you think
you’re going to accomplish?’”

That handful of baristas is actually more than 9,000 baristas at more
than 360 stores
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where workers have voted to unionize. Their union held its first
bargaining session with Starbucks in January 2022, just weeks after
baristas at two Buffalo cafés had led the way by unionizing their
locations. But as dozens of other cafés unionized as well, Starbucks
failed to respond for months to requests to bargain, a union official
said. (Starbucks has insisted on bargaining individual contracts with
each unionized store—a hugely time-consuming strategy for workers
and, according to one union official, a highly lucrative approach for
Starbucks’s law firm.)

When the union called for an arrangement in which some workers would
meet face-to-face with Starbucks’s negotiators, while other workers,
who were unable to afford the money or time to attend in person, used
Zoom to watch, Starbucks all but shut down negotiations nationwide by
refusing to participate. Early on, Starbucks had allowed Zoom, but
then it reversed course
[[link removed]].
The company said it wouldn’t join hybrid sessions because it feared
that workers would record the negotiations and then use parts of those
recordings on social media to embarrass and pressure the company. A
union official insisted that no workers have recorded or plan to
record the sessions.

In December 2022, the National Labor Relations Board filed a complaint
[[link removed]]
against the company, saying it failed to bargain in good faith with 21
stores in the Pacific Northwest. Then, last April, the labor board
filed a nationwide complaint
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that said Starbucks had illegally “failed and refused” to bargain
at 144 stores across the United States. As for the first two upstate
New York stores that unionized, the NLRB said
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Starbucks had “bargained with no intention of reaching agreement,”
and behaved in ways “demeaning and otherwise undermining the
union’s chosen representatives.”

In September in Seattle, an NLRB judge began a high-stakes trial
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expected to last at least five months, that will determine whether
Starbucks failed to bargain in good faith by refusing to do hybrid
bargaining. After the trial began, Duran told the local media outside
the hearing, “It shouldn’t take a year and a half to get to the
table just because they don’t like the way that we’ve all decided
that we want to bargain with the company.”

Starbucks has repeatedly maintained that it is bargaining in good
faith. “Starbucks has approached bargaining with consistency and a
sincere desire to progress negotiations for partners at every single
store represented by a union,” Starbucks’s senior vice president
of partner resources, May Jensen, said in a statement. (Starbucks
calls its employees “partners.”)

Many baristas scoff at this assertion, just as many deride the
company’s repeated claims that it has never broken the law when
battling against the union—despite the rulings by four NLRB members,
three federal appellate judges, two federal district judges, and 17
administrative law judges, who have issued a total of 44 decisions
finding that Starbucks has violated the law by, for instance, closing
a store because it had unionized. Not only that, but various judges
have ruled that Starbucks has unlawfully fired 36 baristas in
retaliation for supporting the union. In mid-December, the NLRB filed
a​ highly unusual complaint
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that accused Starbucks of unlawfully shutting 23 stores to suppress
pro-union activity; it sought an order to force Starbucks to reopen
them.

“I’m sure their official position is they intend to bargain and
reach a contract,” Duran said. But “when they say they’re
bargaining in good faith, I ask them, ‘Where? Give me one
example.’ They can’t find an example.”

Andrew Trull, a Starbucks spokesperson, said the company “remains
focused on supporting all partners and on progressing negotiations at
every store where partners have elected union representation.”

Duran has been less involved in the contract talks than in separate
negotiations about helping workers affected by Starbucks’s closing
of several cafés in Seattle. I was supposed to interview several
other baristas who are very involved in the contract talks, but the
union cautioned them against talking to the media before they testify
at the Seattle trial. The trial judge has threatened to strike
workers’ testimony from the record if they discuss their testimony
with other witnesses, including in public forums like interviews with
the media. A union official said that Starbucks’s law firm, Littler
Mendelson, has indicated that it will likely subpoena dozens of
barista negotiators to testify in the trial.

“If you’re going to hire Littler Mendelson or Morgan Lewis, part
of their playbook is to wear people down and cause the situation to
move toward a decertification,” said Sandy Pope, director of
bargaining for the Office and Professional Employees International
Union. Starbucks boasts
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that workers at more than a dozen Starbucks have petitioned for
decertification votes, but the NLRB has moved
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to block several petitions; one NLRB regional director said
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that the many charges accusing Starbucks of unlawful firings, threats,
and retaliation “irrevocably taint the [decertification] petition
and any related election.”

Daisy Pitkin, field director of the Starbucks unionization campaign,
sees another important reason many companies resist first contracts.
“What really matters isn’t just winning a union election—that
isn’t creating sustained power with a company,” she said.
“Sustained power is a structure to turn the collective will of
workers into concrete gains, and to do that, one must codify those
gains into a union contract.”

When companies drag out negotiations because they hope workers will
decertify, they are often motivated by an even deeper goal: They know
that if they sign a first contract that includes important gains for
workers, then workers at other stores and locations—indeed workers
throughout the company—will be emboldened to unionize as well. And
when a company prevents a first contract, a union is far
weaker—unable to collect dues and hampered in its ability to bring
others into the fold.

On a Saturday afternoon in September, a busy time for shopping, more
than 60 workers at the REI store in the SoHo neighborhood of Manhattan
staged an unusual walkout
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effectively closing the store. They were angry not only because REI
had just cut the pay of many SoHo workers by an average of $2 per hour
but also because they still didn’t have a contract after having
become
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the nation’s first unionized REI 18 months earlier, when they joined
the Retail, Wholesale, and Department Store Union.

In 2022, REI gave raises to workers at all its stores except the SoHo
store, but in December of that year, after workers protested, the
company reached a six-month agreement that gave the SoHo workers that
raise in exchange for a promise not to strike. After the six months
elapsed, REI rescinded the raise for the SoHo workers. Around that
time, it hired
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Morgan Lewis to replace a less aggressively anti-union law firm. The
SoHo workers were soon complaining that with Morgan Lewis at the
table, the pace of bargaining had slowed.

“Negotiations have been really difficult,” Graham Gale, a bike and
ski technician, told me. “They give us back our proposal, and
they’ve completely crossed out all the things we presented.” Their
aim, Gale said, is to make members of the bargaining committee “get
burned out and ultimately quit.” The Morgan Lewis lawyers “know
they’re making money while they’re trying to wear us down,” Gale
went on. “They don’t have an incentive to move on things because
the longer it takes, the more they get paid.”

Carlos Angel Barajas, an REI sales specialist who serves on the
union’s bargaining committee, put it thus: If someone needed to use
a pencil at the negotiations, there would first be a 30-minute dispute
about the color of the pencil. Barajas, who became an REI member right
after high school, when he was an avid rock climber, is dismayed by
the behavior of a company he has long loved. “It feels like a
betrayal,” he said. “We feel not just unheard after we express our
concerns and our needs, but we often feel dismissed.”

“I’m disgusted,” Barajas added, “that a lawyer who is making
more in an hour than I make in a whole paycheck is telling me why I
shouldn’t get some raise or benefit that would help me survive.”

In a statement, REI said it’s typical to take at least 19 months to
hammer out a first contract. “Negotiating a first collective
bargaining agreement is a lengthy process,” a spokesperson said.
“We are engaged in good faith bargaining with stores that have
chosen union representation and will continue to participate fully in
the negotiating process.” Thus far, eight REI stores have unionized;
none has a contract.

San Francisco State’s Logan said it shouldn’t be typical to take
more than a year and a half to reach a first contract. In many other
advanced industrial countries, he said, it takes just three or four
months.

Christian Smalls, who led the Amazon Labor Union’s landmark effort
[[link removed]] to
unionize 8,300 workers at an Amazon warehouse on Staten Island, said
that zero progress had been made toward negotiating a first contract
since the union won on April 1, 2022. No bargaining sessions have been
held. Smalls maintained that Amazon had sought to avoid bargaining by
continuing to appeal the legitimacy of the union’s more than
500-vote victory. “Of course they’re delaying,” Smalls said.
“That’s everybody’s strategy. Amazon doesn’t want a union in
any part of America.”

Amazon has raised
[[link removed]]
more than two dozen objections to the union’s victory, asserting
that Smalls and other organizers illegally coerced and misled workers
and claiming that the NLRB improperly tilted in favor of the union.
After losing an early round
[[link removed]]
in the litigation, Amazon has continued its appeals. “Both the NLRB
and the [Amazon Labor Union] improperly influenced the outcome, and we
don’t believe it represents what the majority of our team wants,”
said Mary Kate Paradis, an Amazon spokeswoman. “As a company, we
don’t think unions are the best answer for our employees.”

One reason Amazon is reluctant to reach a contract is it knows that
the thousands of unionized workers on Staten Island won’t pay any
union dues until they have a contract. Until it can collect dues
money, labor experts note, the independent Amazon Labor Union will be
impoverished; but with dues from 8,000-plus workers, it would be far
stronger—and in theory, have the resources to begin campaigns at
other Amazon facilities.

At the first Apple Store that unionized—in Towson, Maryland—there
is also dismay about it taking far more than a year to reach a first
contract. Union negotiators say they’ve encountered a peculiar and
particularly frustrating obstacle. “They’re the most conceited
company I’ve ever dealt with. They don’t think they need any
outside ideas,” said Jay Wadleigh, a business representative with
the machinists’ union, the union the Towson workers voted to join.
“They think they have all the answers.”

After the union presents its proposals, Wadleigh said, Apple’s
negotiators respond, “We’re sticking with Apple’s policies on
this.” They act like a cult, he added, as if they’re a perfect
company that doesn’t need to change anything. “I told them if
everything worked so well at Apple, the workers wouldn’t have formed
a union.”

The negotiations with Apple have reached tentative agreements on
dozens of topics, including grievance procedures, probation periods,
and shop stewards—but there’s been little agreement on economic
issues. The workers acknowledge that Apple has good benefits, but they
say changes are needed to improve their work-life balance.

According to Wadleigh, the pace of negotiations has sped up since
Apple hired a Walgreens executive to run negotiations, replacing
attorneys from the Seyfarth Shaw law firm. “I honestly don’t think
they want to be compared with Starbucks or Amazon,” he said.

In a statement, Apple said it worked hard to provide an “excellent
experience” for its retail workers: “We’re proud to provide them
with industry leading compensation and exceptional benefits. As
always, we continue to engage with the union representing our team in
Towson respectfully and in good faith.”

 
 
Do the workers confronting so many inventive—and infuriating—ways
of prolonging negotiations have any recourse? The surest solution, if
not the easiest, would be to change the law. Labor experts say there
is a simple legislative fix to reaching first contracts more quickly.
The Protecting the Right to Organize Act, which the House passed in
2021
[[link removed]],
states that if no first contract is reached within 90 days after
negotiations begin, either side can request mediation. If mediation
doesn’t succeed within 30 days, they are to select a three-person
arbitration panel that will decide the terms of a two-year-long first
contract. President Joe Biden supports
[[link removed]]
the PRO Act, but it died in the Senate because it couldn’t get the
60 votes necessary to overcome a Republican filibuster. If passed, the
law would greatly speed up negotiations, Bronfenbrenner predicted,
because corporations are usually eager to avoid settling union
contracts through arbitration. Facing that prospect, companies often
get serious about bargaining. The approach has worked elsewhere:
Several Canadian provinces have legislation that calls for
first-contract arbitration.

In its accusations that Starbucks and Amazon have refused to bargain
in good faith, the NLRB has shown some frustration with employers that
are slow to agree to a first contract. Jennifer ­Abruzzo, the labor
board’s general counsel, has proposed a powerful way to turn up the
pressure on companies. The NLRB, she argues, should overturn
[[link removed]] the 1970
Ex-Cell-O decision, in which the labor board ruled that it can’t
impose financial penalties on employers that refuse to bargain in good
faith. Abruzzo wants the board to adopt a new rule holding that when
companies don’t bargain in good faith, they can be required
[[link removed]] to “make
employees whole with monetary relief for the lost opportunity to make
gains through the collective bargaining process.” Such monetary
relief could mean, for instance, paying out money that workers would
have received as raises to keep up with the past two years of
inflation.

There are also potent nonlegislative methods available to persuade
companies to move faster. Ultimately, Cornell’s Bronfenbrenner said,
you “have to find a way that costs the company more not to settle
than to settle”—for example, pressuring investors or blocking a
company’s expansion plans or interfering with its supply chain.
“Unions might have to do all of that,” she suggested, “before
companies come seriously to the table.”

Along these lines, more and more worker advocates have called
[[link removed]]
for a nationwide boycott of Starbucks to pressure it to speed up
efforts to reach a contract. Marshall Ganz worked as the United Farm
Workers’ organizing director under Cesar Chavez when that union was
carrying out a nationwide grape boycott that ultimately forced growers
to reach a contract in 1970; he now teaches at Harvard’s Kennedy
School of Government. He said a Starbucks boycott would be a good
idea, “but it would take a lot of work.” He argued that it would
also be helpful if students tried to drive Starbucks off their
campuses across the United States, as Cornell has done. “That would
be a hell of a campaign,” Ganz said. “There’s a lot of leverage
there.”

Officials from the Starbucks workers union, Workers United, declined
to say whether they would call for a boycott, although they did not
shy from assailing the negotiations’ glacial pace. “Time is a
weapon to try to defeat unions’ progress in organizing and make
workers feel that the process is futile,” said Lynne Fox, president
of Workers United. “Our union and Starbucks workers are not going to
back down. We will win a contract.”

Hurt by the talk of a boycott and by a mid-November walkout
[[link removed]]
at more than 200 locations, Starbucks wrote
[[link removed]]
to the union on December 8, saying it wanted to resume negotiations.
The letter appeared to suggest, however, that the company still
intended to reject hybrid negotiations—the reason talks broke down
in the first place. One longtime barista told me she thought it was
merely PR.

As Trader Joe’s workers continue their fight for a first contract,
Sarah Beth Ryther urges workers not to get demoralized. “Certainly a
contract is our ultimate goal,” she said. “However, with a union,
we have tiny wins in our store every day.” Before the store
unionized, it was often scary for employees to talk to their bosses,
but that has changed. Through the union, the workers have created
online forums to discuss problems and how to take action. Union
representatives can ask for meetings with management on behalf of
members. “Before, we were at the mercy of a bad manager, and we had
to deal with that every single day. Now we can file unfair labor
practice charges,” Ryther said. “But more important, now we can
stand up together.”  

Steven Greenhouse [[link removed]]
@greenhousenyt [[link removed]]

Steven Greenhouse, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation, covered
labor for _The New York Times_ for 19 years and is the author of
_Beaten Down, Worked Up_:_ The Past, Present, and Future of American
Labor__._

* First Contract Campaigns; US Labor Law; Trader Joe; Starbucks;
Amazon; REI; Apple;
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