The Supreme Court ruled in favor of Starbucks on Thursday in a challenge against a labor ruling by a federal judge, making it more difficult for a key federal agency to intervene when a company is accused of illegally suppressing labor organizing.
Eight justices backed the majority opinion, which was written by Justice Clarence Thomas. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote a separate opinion that concurred with the overall judgment but dissented on certain points.
The ruling came in a case brought by Starbucks over the firing of seven workers in Memphis, Tennessee, who were trying to unionize a store in 2022. The company said it had fired them for allowing a television crew into a closed store. The workers said that they were fired for their unionization efforts and that the company didn’t typically enforce the rules they were accused of violating.
After the firings, the National Labor Relations Board issued a complaint saying that Starbucks had acted because the workers had “joined or assisted the union and engaged in concerted activities, and to discourage employees from engaging in these activities.” Separately, lawyers for the board asked a federal judge in Tennessee for an injunction reinstating the workers, and the judge issued the order in August 2022.
The agency asks judges to reinstate workers in such cases because resolving the underlying legal issues can take years.
In its petition to the Supreme Court, the company argued that federal courts had differing standards when deciding whether to grant injunctions that reinstate workers, which the NLRB has the authority to seek under the National Labor Relations Act.
Some apply a looser standard, requiring the labor board to show that there was “reasonable cause” to believe the company had violated labor law. Others use a stricter standard, requiring the board to show that not reinstating the workers would cause “irreparable harm,” and that the board was likely to prevail in the case.
Starbucks argued that the stricter standard for reinstating workers should apply nationwide. NLRB argued that the apparent differences between the two standards were semantic and that there was effectively one standard in place already, making it unnecessary for the Supreme Court to intervene.
The majority opinion rejected the board’s argument that the differences between the two standards were semantic.
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