June 05, 2026|Franchise Frontlines
June 5, 2026 | National Labor Relations Board | Published, precedential Board decision (374 NLRB No. 128; 2026 WL 1653597)
Executive Summary
In this published, precedential decision, a three-member panel of the National Labor Relations Board — Chairman James R. Murphy and Members David M. Prouty and Scott A. Mayer — affirmed Administrative Law Judge Brian D. Gee’s finding that Starbucks Corporation violated Section 8(a)(1) of the National Labor Relations Act by coercively interrogating employees at three Seattle stores about whether they intended to work their scheduled shifts during strikes that employees announced on various dates between April 14 and July 14, 2022. The General Counsel and the Charging Party, Workers United, contended that Starbucks supervisors and agents questioned employees by telephone and text about their strike intentions without explaining any staffing purpose and without assuring them against reprisal, as Board precedent requires; Starbucks countered that an employer may lawfully ask about staffing when it reasonably believes a strike is imminent, absent threats, promises, or other coercive conduct, and that the safeguards the General Counsel invoked amount to an impermissible per se rule. Applying the objective, totality-of-the-circumstances test of Rossmore House and the strike-staffing safeguards drawn from Preterm, Inc. and its progeny, the Board concluded that because the inquiries neither explained their purpose nor assured against reprisal, they tended to coerce employees in the exercise of their Section 7 rights, and it adopted, as modified to conform to standard remedial language, a cease-and-desist Order requiring Starbucks to post notices at its 5th & Pike and Westlake stores and to mail notices to former employees of the closed 505 Union Station store.
Relevant Background
Starbucks Corporation is a Washington corporation headquartered in Seattle that operates approximately 9,000 stores nationwide and employs roughly 220,000 employees it refers to as “partners.” Its North American retail operations are organized into twelve geographic regions, which are further divided into areas and districts, with a management hierarchy running from Regional Vice President and Regional Director down through District Manager, Store Manager, and Assistant Store Manager. Starbucks maintains store staffing minimums for safety — its Partner Guide requires at least two partners in a store at all times, and some formats, such as a drive-thru, require more — and it requires employees to give notice if they will miss a shift. According to the decision, when a store faces a staffing shortage from events such as power outages, illness, or weather, managers would typically contact scheduled employees to ask whether they could still work.
This matter concerns three Seattle stores at which Workers United had petitioned to represent employees and had prevailed in Board elections: the 5th & Pike store, the Westlake Drive-Thru store, and the 505 Union Station store. On various dates between April 14 and July 14, 2022, employees at these stores sent management written strike notices stating the reasons for each strike, its start and end dates, and the names of the striking employees. In response, Starbucks supervisors and agents telephoned and texted employees to ask whether they were going to work their scheduled shifts or otherwise wanted shifts during the strike. For example, at 5th & Pike, District Manager Amy Quesenberry and Store Manager Jeremiah Mackler called employees named in the strike notices to ask whether they planned to work; at Westlake, District Manager Thai Le Douglass called and Assistant Store Manager Brendan Branson texted employees asking whether they were “planning on attending the strike today”; and at 505 Union Station, Area Operations Coach Kim Davis called and texted employees. The decision found that in each instance the supervisors did not explain the purpose of the questions and did not give assurances against reprisal based on the answers.
Workers United filed the underlying unfair labor practice charge on July 18, 2022. The General Counsel issued the complaint on January 4, 2023, amended it twice at hearing, and tried the case before Administrative Law Judge Brian D. Gee in Seattle in July 2023 and by video in August 2023. Judge Gee issued his decision on January 31, 2024, finding that Starbucks violated Section 8(a)(1) by coercively interrogating employees, and recommended a cease-and-desist Order with notice posting and, for the 505 Union Station store — which had permanently closed on July 31, 2022 — notice mailing to former employees. Starbucks filed exceptions and briefs, the General Counsel and Charging Party filed answering briefs, and the Board issued the present Decision and Order on June 5, 2026, affirming the judge and adopting the recommended Order as modified.
Decision
The Board evaluated the interrogation allegations under Section 8(a)(1), which makes it an unfair labor practice for an employer to interfere with, restrain, or coerce employees in the exercise of their Section 7 rights. As the decision framed it, the governing test from Rossmore House asks whether questioning “reasonably tends to restrain, coerce, or interfere with rights guaranteed by the Act, under the totality of the circumstances,” and is objective — it does not turn on whether an employee was in fact intimidated. The decision recited the non-exhaustive Bourne/Westwood Health Care factors (background between employer and union, the nature of the information sought, the identity of the questioner, the place and method, the truthfulness of the reply, and whether the employee was an open union supporter) as areas of inquiry rather than a mechanical checklist. Against that backdrop, the decision treated employer interrogation of employees’ strike sentiments as “inherently coercive” under Transportation Management, subject to a limited exception when an employer needs to determine whether it will have sufficient staffing to operate during a strike.
For that staffing exception, the decision applied the safeguards developed in Preterm, Inc. and its progeny: an employer may question employees about their plans to participate in a strike only if it simultaneously (1) fully explains the purpose of the questioning, (2) assures employees that no reprisals will flow from their responses, and (3) otherwise does not create a coercive atmosphere. Applying that standard, the Board agreed with Judge Gee that the Starbucks supervisors asked about strike intentions without explaining that they were merely trying to gauge staffing and without assuring against reprisal, so the questioning “was coercive.” Notably, the decision credited that the supervisors were in fact “simply trying to determine whether there were going to be enough employees available to open and staff its stores,” but held that this “lawful intention did not excuse Respondent from following the safeguards.” It reasoned that asking employees whether they intended to work their shifts was “effectively asking whether they intended to strike,” particularly where the questioners were high-ranking managers and many of the employees had already identified themselves as strikers in the notices.
The Board rejected Starbucks’s principal legal arguments. It declined Starbucks’s contention that the Preterm safeguards constitute an impermissible per se rule — an argument that relied chiefly on the dissenters in Sunbelt Rentals, Inc., whose position the Sunbelt Rentals majority had rejected and which the panel found controlling here. It also rejected Starbucks’s reliance on the mid-1970s decision in Mosher Steel for the proposition that staffing questioning is lawful “absent threats, promises, or other coercive conduct,” explaining that more than four decades of subsequent Board law require the safeguards. In affirming, the Board made several modifications: it relied not on the judge’s finding that the questioning occurred amid “perceived” unfair labor practices but on cases finding actual prior Starbucks unfair labor practices; it found it unnecessary to pass on the judge’s separate finding that a July 15, 2022 text message at 5th & Pike was also unlawful because it would not affect the remedy; it adopted, in the absence of exceptions, the judge’s dismissal of one Westlake allegation; and it modified the recommended Order to conform to standard remedial language, including mailing notices to former employees of the closed 505 Union Station store.
Although this dispute arose in company-operated retail stores rather than a franchise system, its analysis speaks directly to the manager-to-employee contact that recurs across branded, multi-unit operations. The decision draws a line between a lawful staffing inquiry and unlawful coercive interrogation, and it locates that line not in whether the question is asked but in how it is asked — whether the manager states a legitimate purpose and assures against reprisal at the moment of the inquiry. That distinction is relevant wherever store-level managers interact with employees who are exercising rights under the Act, and it carries added weight because this is a Board decision rather than a stand-alone administrative law judge ruling.
Looking Forward
For employers and branded multi-unit systems, the practical signal from this decision is that the manner of a strike-staffing inquiry can control its legal outcome. On this record, the Board held that a genuine and even credited staffing purpose would not save questioning that failed to state that purpose to the employee and to assure against reprisal. An employer that concludes it must ask about strike staffing could reduce the risk this Board identified by having the manager state the staffing purpose plainly, expressly assure the employee that no reprisal will follow the answer, and otherwise avoid a coercive setting — the three elements the Board applied here. The lesson the decision itself draws is not that managers must stay silent about scheduling during a strike, but that any such inquiry should be framed carefully and paired with those assurances.
The exposure may be greater in franchised and other branded multi-unit systems, where a large number of front-line store managers make exactly the kind of phone and text contact at issue here, often without legal review and without training on the difference between a lawful staffing question and an unlawful interrogation. Because the union-organizing tactics that generated this dispute can migrate to franchised systems, employers in those systems may wish to treat the decision as a cautionary marker and to consider written protocols or scripts instructing managers, if they must ask about strike staffing at all, to state the purpose and include an anti-reprisal assurance, and to keep any inquiry narrowly focused. Whether the principle would reach any particular franchised operation would depend on the facts and on the joint-employer posture of the system, so the transfer of this holding to a franchise setting should be understood as analogous rather than controlling.
Two further points bear watching. First, on the remedial side, the Board’s Order confirms that closing a location does not extinguish the obligation to remedy an unfair labor practice: because the 505 Union Station store had closed, the remedy took the form of mailing notices to former employees, and systems that consolidate or close units during or after a labor dispute may find that remedies follow displaced employees. Second, Starbucks’s constitutional challenges to the removal protections for Board members and administrative law judges were rejected as untimely because they were not raised before the post-hearing brief, and its request that a Board member recuse himself was denied; an employer that intends to preserve such threshold arguments would be well advised to raise them at the earliest stage rather than for the first time on exceptions. As always, these are observations about how this Board resolved this record, not concessions of free-standing law.
Thomas O’Connell is a Partner at Buchalter LLP and Chair of the firm’s Franchise Practice Group. For questions about this article or media inquiries, you can contact Tom at toconnell@buchalter.com.
This article is based solely on the opinion of the Court in this matter. The author has not conducted any independent investigation into the facts. For the avoidance of doubt, each statement related to the law and facts in this article is drawn from the Court’s opinion in this case. It was drafted with the assistance of an artificial intelligence system. AI systems can make mistakes, including in describing legal authority. Readers should independently confirm any legal authority before relying on it.
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