Bad Takes is a column of opinion and analysis.
“And I’m not against unions,” then-U.S. Sen. Markwayne Mullin, R-Oklahoma, said in during a March 2023 hearing examining accusations about former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz’s union-busting tactics.
Last week, Mullin was confirmed as the new Secretary of Homeland Security, replacing Kristi Noem.
“If you want to choose to be in a union, be in a union,” continued Mullin. “But if you choose not to, then you choose not to. And that’s why I’m good with right-to- work states. It creates a happy environ- ment, and a good environment, because employees get to choose. What is wrong with choice?”
To date, workers at more than 680 Starbucks stores in the U.S. have chosen to form a union, yet not a single contract has been finalized due to unfair labor practices (ULP) on the part of the $100 billion corporation. That’s not an allegation, that’s the legal determination of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), which has found Starbucks guilty of literally hundreds of violations of federal labor law since 2021, the year the first coffeehouse voted to unionize in Buffalo, New York.
By the following December, the higher-ups had shuttered that first union shop, in what an NLRB judge deemed “egregious and widespread misconduct demonstrating a general disregard for employees’ fundamental rights.” The store was ordered to reopen and serves customers to this day.
So there I am, two Saturdays ago outside my local Starbucks near North Star Mall, handing out leaflets as patrons pull up for their morning coffee fix. I ask them to delete the Starbucks app off their phones and sign the “No Contract? No Coffee!” pledge — sometimes to eyerolls, but mostly to polite indifference.
Selfishly, I worry that it may be a long while before I can walk up the street and purchase a coffee there again guilt-free. Good news arrived on March 24, however, as Starbucks Workers United posted that “the company has agreed to resume con- tract negotiations with us” in response to employees’ ongoing strike. Fingers crossed.
Although 7 in 10 Americans say they approve of labor unions, as long as they’re not taking their business elsewhere, corporations including Starbucks and Amazon continue to obstruct, delay, suppress and harass to avoid workers being represented. The pro-labor Economic Policy Institute noted that large employers already spend more than $400 million on “union avoidance” consultants annually to dissuade representation-curious workers.
“What is wrong with choice?” Mullin asked during the 2023 hearing.
In his first year, Victor Wembanyama’s salary was set at roughly $12 million. Why couldn’t he have chosen to not join the players’ union and held out for a salary above the rookie minimum, which the Spurs — or most any other team — would surely have been willing to pay? Texas is a right-to-work state, after all.
That’s because the National Basketball Players Association, founded in 1954, is the exclusive representative for all players in the league. It’s the same for every one of the Big Four sports leagues, and every couple decades or so, the athletes we love go on strike to win a better deal from the owners.
Somehow, this arrangement doesn’t induce fits of cognitive dissonance in advocates of right-to-work laws, who just as unthinkingly as the rest of us root fortheir favorite teams.
Wemby no doubt received the highest-quality medical care after doctors discovered a blood clot in his right shoulder last year. Yet despite wearing the same logo on their respective uniforms, the janitors who clean up after games don’t enjoy the union protections of those on the court or the field. Is it any less noble to push a broom than toss a ball around?
As the Current reported in October, unionized hospitality and service industry workers at the UNITE HERE Local 23 publicly opposed continuing development of the new Spurs arena without demanding better than “market prevailing” wages.
“Concession workers at stadiums often need to work two or three jobs to make ends meet,” the union stated. “If we, as a city, are going to invest millions of dollars into this project, we need to ensure that it doesn’t add to the poverty jobs already available.”
According to UnionStats.com, a database which Trinity University economist David Macpherson helps put together, only 4% of employees in the San Antonio-New Braunfels area are covered by a union contract. That rises to 15% for public sector workers but drops to a meager 2% for the private sector. Across the country, exactly what you would expect remains true: for workers without a college degree, nonunion wages earn you $10 less per hour.
Is it any wonder that wealth inequality is skyrocketing?
Those who honestly believed the Trump cabinet would be union-friendly because a union president spoke at the Republican National Convention were quickly dealt a rude awakening. Barely a week into his second term, Trump fired two NLRB officials, defanging the agency.
Predictably, the total number of NLRB-overseen union elections plummeted by 30% last year. Trump Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer, despite co-sponsoring the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act as a congresswoman, pulled a 180 and no longer supports the sorely needed legislation.
Under the guise of “deregulation,” the administration has weakened Occupational Safety and Health Administration protections. And the Federal Trade Commission abandoned the nationwide ban on noncompete agreements — contracts barring employees from working for a competitor or starting their own business after leaving a job. Noncompete agreements “are associated with significantly slower wage growth for low-education workers,” according to a working paper published this month by the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago.
This in spite of Trump’s professed love for “the poorly educated.”
Faced with myriad challenges, union membership has still grown to its highest level since 2009. Nurses in particular have won historic gains of late. Workers on the picket line are doing exactly what they’re supposed to be doing — expecting more out of life. It’s up to voters to hire lawmakers who will protect and expand their rights.
A new study from the Center for Working Class Politics revealed, of all congressional candidates between 2010 and 2022, just 4.5% had a union background. Unionized workplaces should not be a fringe phenomenon, but the default setting, as they are in Belgium and the Nordic countries.
To opponents of organized labor, kindly turn off major league football, baseball, hockey and basketball, and enjoy your Starbucks — for now.
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