By the end of June 2024, the NLRB had administered 566 Starbucks union elections. The union won 465 (82 percent) of those elections, resulting in a total unionized workforce of 10,916 Starbucks employees.
Administering 566 elections in less than three years is, by itself, a tremendous undertaking. In the three years prior to the Starbucks campaign, the NLRB administered an annual average of just 1,156 union elections for the entire country.
Running these elections was just a small fraction of the workload that was thrust upon the NLRB by the Starbucks unionization effort. In addition to these 566 elections, the NLRB:
- Processed 1,096 unfair labor practice charges.
- Issued 17 published board decisions.
- Issued 96 unpublished board decisions.
- Issued 74 administrative law judge decisions.
- Issued 106 regional election decisions.
- Filed 6 appellate court briefs in 5 different federal circuit courts.
- Sought 12 preliminary injunctions in federal district court.
- Appealed 2 of those injunction requests into circuit court.
- Litigated 1 preliminary injunction request to the Supreme Court.
These NLRB processes also involved a huge number of outside lawyers. Across all of the unfair labor practice charges and representation petitions filed as part of the Starbucks organizing campaign, there were 7,438 notices of appearance from 390 different legal representatives, with the majority of those appearances coming from Littler Mendelson attorneys.
One rough way to assess how significant this expenditure of agency resources has been is to divide the 10,916 unionized workers by some of these figures, as I have done in the graph below.
For every published board decision related to Starbucks, there are 642 unionized Starbucks workers. For every unpublished board decision, ALJ decision, and regional election decision, there are between 100 and 150 unionized Starbucks employees. Combining all four decision types together reveals that there are 37 unionized Starbucks workers per NLRB decision. And these figures do not even include the agency time spent litigating against Starbucks in district courts, circuit courts, and the Supreme Court.
Analyzing the agency documents themselves reveals that the NLRB has produced at least 2.7 million words across 5,900 pages in Starbucks-related cases. These figures only include the words and pages contained in board decisions and federal court briefs. Adding in the words and pages contained in hearing transcripts, complaints, motions, exceptions, and the various briefs accompanying those things would at the very least double these figures, if not triple or quadruple them. This means that the NLRB has produced more pages of Starbucks legal documents than there are unionized Starbucks workers.
These rough figures illuminate the limits of the NLRB beyond the specific Starbucks context. If it takes this many government resources to unionize less than 11,000 workers, then it is inconceivable that the current NLRB model would ever be able to facilitate anything more than a small trickle of unionization.
This is especially true because the processing capacity of the NLRB is constrained both by the procedural demands of the law and by how much money Congress appropriates to it in a given year. If union activity increases but the NLRB’s budget remains the same, the amount of unionization that actually results from the increased activity probably will not change much at all. Indeed, it is probably no coincidence that NLRB processing times dramatically increased around the same time that the agency began dealing with the massive Starbucks caseload.
For those opposed to unions, this state of affairs has some obvious appeal. With the NLRB acting as a bottleneck for unionization, there seems to be very little unions can do to quickly grow their membership. For those in favor of unionization, or in favor of government efficiency more generally, the current system is a disaster that can only be fixed through a radical legislative overhaul.