Starbucks has been trying to fend off a growing union movement for several months. As of Friday, the NLRB has certified votes for unionization at 199 Starbucks stores and voted against unionization at 36. So far, election petitions have been filed at 314 stores in total. Starbucks charges that NLRB officials allowed some pro-union workers to vote in person even though it had been decided that ballots would be submitted by mail. Some workers missed the deadline to vote by mail but were not offered the option to vote in person, Starbucks claimed, encouraging a result in favor of the union. The coffee chain also alleged that NLRB workers gave the union information such as when and how many ballots it received in the mail. “In light of these types of misconduct by NLRB staff, we are asking the Board to immediately suspend all Starbucks mail-in elections nationwide … pending a thorough investigation,” Starbucks said in the letter. Starbucks is asking that the results of a board investigation into the alleged misconduct be made public and that “safeguards to prevent future misconduct” be put in place before moving forward. In the future, he wants elections to be held in person. “The NLRB does not comment on open cases,” Kayla Blado, director and press secretary in the NLRB’s office of Congressional and Public Affairs, said in a statement about the letter. “The agency has established procedures to raise challenges regarding the handling of both electoral matters and unfair labor practice cases,” he said. “These challenges should be made in case-specific depositions.” Blado noted that any questions raised in these channels will be considered “carefully and objectively” by the board. The stores voting to unionize are just a fraction of the roughly 9,000 Starbucks ( SBUX ) company-operated stores in the United States. However, Starbucks has taken the efforts seriously. Starbucks has made it clear that it wants a direct line of communication with workers and that a union would stand in the way. He said he can’t guarantee that workers in a union will have access to certain benefits offered to non-union employees. And in May, Starbucks said it was concerned that the White House left it out of a meeting with union representatives. Union organizers say the coffee chain acted unfairly and that the NLRB’s letter is another example of the company’s bad faith. “This is Starbucks once again trying to distract from their unprecedented anti-union campaign,” Starbucks Workers United said in a statement. “Ultimately, this is the latest attempt by Starbucks to manipulate the legal process to their advantage and prevent workers from exercising their fundamental right to organize.” Starbucks says it respects workers’ right to seek a union. The NLRB has also accused the company of unfairly punishing workers who want to unionize. The board said Friday that it is currently processing 284 unfair labor practice cases against Starbucks that are not necessarily related to election petitions. In the letter, Starbucks noted that “the NLRB’s General Counsel and other Board staff have repeatedly stated that Starbucks has committed more than one hundred ‘unfair labor practice’ violations, but that “those statements are contradicted by the fact that the The Board of Directors has to date made no finding as to the merits of any violation by Starbucks.”
