In The Muppet Christmas Carol, the “Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come” escorts Ebenezeer Scrooge back to a graveyard after taking Scrooge through a disturbing future, prompting Scrooge to say, “Must we return to this place?” As we forecasted last week, much like the Dickensian apparition, so, too, does our blog return to the

As the mainstream media has reported, President Trump is firing everyone he can (and maybe some he can’t) at the National Labor Relations Board. On day one, the president fired the NLRB’s general counsel, Jennifer Abruzzo, a former union lawyer who President Biden appointed in July 2021. Abruzzo had been known for her aggressive agency-directive

The Recent Starbucks Decision

The National Labor Relations Board issued yet another Starbucks decision this past week. Again, the Board upheld an administrative law judge’s opinion that Starbucks violated the National Labor Relations Act during a union’s organizing campaign at a New York retail location. This new Starbucks decision is an excellent reminder about what

The top lawyer for the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) is ordering her subordinates to continue to seek injunctions against employers for alleged violations of the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), despite the Supreme Court seemingly making it more difficult to obtain an injunction to enjoin an unfair labor practice.

Section 10(j) of the NLRA

If you don’t already know, Starbucks has been in a pretty big labor dispute, and there are bound to be lessons for all of us. If your company has internal documents about relations with prospective unions, you may have to disclose them in a labor dispute even though pre-hearing discovery is generally not available. You

Are PhD students at a private university who also teach courses and grade papers – tasks that are a part of their development but also certainly assist the university – employees who can unionize?  The NLRB said yes for a second time. This trend that allows unionization of employees who were once thought to be

Can you still have noncompete agreements with your employees? There has been a lot of buzz about this issue, and this week the general counsel of the National Labor Relations Board joined the conversation with a memorandum, GC 23-08, opining that noncompete and nonsolicitation agreements violate the National Labor Relations Act. This continues a

In Glacier Northwest, Inc. v.  Int’l Brotherhood of Teamsters Local Union 174, the Washington Supreme Court addressed the issue of whether a union is responsible for property damage incident to a strike. How does that issue arise? Let’s just suppose that your company is involved in a bitter labor negotiation with the unionized workforce.