- December 2021: Workers at Starbucks’ La Quinta, California location began organizing with Workers United. Shift supervisors Andrea Hernandez and Jazmine Cardenas were openly involved.
- May 2022: Workers United filed unfair labor practice charges, alleging Starbucks illegally restricted employees from talking about the union on the job.
- Starbucks’ move: While defending itself against those charges, Starbucks used the NLRB’s own subpoena process to demand that Hernandez and Cardenas hand over a sweeping range of materials: messages with the union, communications with coworkers about union activity, statements submitted to the labor board, and related documents.
- The NLRB ruled that demanding that information violated the workers’ rights under Section 8(a)(1) of the National Labor Relations Act and ordered Starbucks to stop and post a remedial notice.
- Starbucks petitioned a federal court to throw out that ruling. On April 17, 2026, the Fifth Circuit sided with Starbucks on procedural grounds: the labor board used the wrong legal test. The case was sent back to the NLRB.
- The underlying question remains unanswered by courts: Can a corporation use federal subpoenas to force union organizers to expose their own protected organizing activity? Nobody has fully decided that yet.
A Drive-Thru, a Vote, and a Paper Trail
Starbucks runs over 16,000 locations in the United States. The one in La Quinta, California is not particularly remarkable. It sits along a strip of desert highway, staffed by workers making wages that don’t move with the cost of living, serving customers who don’t know their barista’s last name. In December 2021, something changed: the workers there decided to do something about it.
They began organizing with Workers United, the union that was rapidly spreading through Starbucks locations across the country during one of the most significant private-sector labor waves in a generation. Two shift supervisors, Andrea Hernandez and Jazmine Cardenas, were not quiet about where they stood. They joined the organizing committee. They were openly pro-union. They did what every labor law in this country says workers are allowed to do.
They won the election. Workers United became the certified bargaining representative at that store.
“They were openly pro-union. They did what every labor law in this country says workers are allowed to do.”
In May 2022, Workers United filed charges with the National Labor Relations Board, alleging that Starbucks had broken the law during the campaign by stopping workers from talking to each other about the union. The NLRB issued a formal complaint. The case moved toward a hearing.
This is the point in the story where most people assume the legal process protects workers. A government agency is prosecuting your employer for violating your rights. You testified or submitted documents. You wait for a decision. Instead, Hernandez and Cardenas found out what happens when a company with an army of lawyers starts preparing its defense.
The Subpoena Strategy: Using Federal Process as a Weapon
Under NLRB rules, employers defending themselves against unfair labor practice charges don’t automatically get access to the opposing side’s documents before a hearing. There’s no standard pretrial discovery the way there is in civil court. What employers do get is the ability to request that the NLRB issue subpoenas compelling people to appear or produce documents at the actual hearing.
The board issues those subpoenas in what the court described as a “ministerial” way, meaning it processes the request without independently judging whether it’s appropriate. The subpoena goes out under the board’s authority. The recipient can petition to revoke it, but until that happens, it carries legal weight.
Starbucks used that mechanism to target the two workers who had led the organizing effort. The subpoenas sent to Hernandez and Cardenas demanded a broad haul of materials:
Communications with the Union, communications with other employees about Union activity, documents provided to the Board, and statements or affidavits relating to the allegations in the complaint.
Source: Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, No. 24-60500, April 17, 2026
Read that list carefully. Starbucks wasn’t just asking for documents related to the specific charges against it. It was demanding access to the private organizing conversations of the very workers whose rights were supposedly at stake in the proceeding. The messages Hernandez and Cardenas sent to union representatives. The communications they had with coworkers while building the campaign. The materials they gave to the government agency investigating their employer.
Starbucks was demanding access to the private organizing conversations of the very workers whose rights were supposedly at stake in the proceeding.
The administrative law judge presiding over the unfair labor practice hearing agreed the subpoenas were too broad and revoked them. The workers petitioned to have them thrown out, and the judge sided with the workers, finding that the requests were overbroad and sought information that could expose protected activity. Starbucks was told it could come back with narrower requests after testimony.
But the NLRB didn’t let it end there. The act of seeking those subpoenas in the first place triggered a second, separate unfair labor practice proceeding. The question was no longer just whether the subpoenas were too broad for discovery purposes. The question became: did demanding that information violate workers’ legal rights under federal labor law?
Timeline: From Organizing to Federal Court
Organizing Begins in La Quinta
Workers at the La Quinta, California Starbucks begin a union organizing campaign with Workers United. Shift supervisors Hernandez and Cardenas join openly.
Union Files Unfair Labor Practice Charges
Workers United charges Starbucks with illegally restricting workers from discussing the union. The NLRB issues a formal complaint and schedules a hearing.
Starbucks Issues Sweeping Subpoenas
While preparing its legal defense, Starbucks obtains NLRB-issued subpoenas targeting Hernandez and Cardenas, demanding private union communications, coworker messages, and board documents.
Administrative Law Judge Revokes the Subpoenas
The ALJ finds the subpoenas overbroad and grants the workers’ petition to revoke them. The original unfair labor practice case is later dismissed on credibility grounds unrelated to the subpoenas.
NLRB Opens Second Proceeding Over the Subpoenas Themselves
The board decides that Starbucks seeking those subpoenas in the first place may have violated Section 8(a)(1) of the NLRA. A second ALJ agrees: the subpoenas violated workers’ rights.
Full NLRB Upholds Ruling Against Starbucks
The board adopts the ALJ’s decision. Starbucks Corp., 372 NLRB No. 159. Starbucks is ordered to stop seeking similar subpoenas and to post a remedial notice in stores.
Fifth Circuit Vacates the NLRB Order
The court rules the NLRB applied the wrong legal standard, vacates the board’s order, and remands the case for a new decision using the correct test. The case continues.
The Legal Fight: What the Court Actually Decided (And What It Didn’t)
Before diving into what the Fifth Circuit ruled, it’s worth being precise about what this case is and isn’t, because the legal language obscures the stakes.
Section 7 of the National Labor Relations Act guarantees workers the right to organize, form unions, bargain collectively, and engage in other protected activity together. Section 8(a)(1) makes it an unfair labor practice for an employer to interfere with, restrain, or coerce workers in exercising those rights. That protection is the backbone of American labor law. It’s what stops bosses from threatening workers for talking about wages or firing someone for handing out union flyers.
The NLRB concluded that Starbucks violated Section 8(a)(1) by using the subpoena process to demand organizers’ private communications. The board applied a legal standard drawn from a 1995 case called National Telephone Directory Corp., which was originally a rule about when workers can keep certain documents confidential in discovery. That test weighs employees’ interest in keeping their organizing activity private against the employer’s need for information to defend itself.
The test for Section 8(a)(1) liability is whether an employer’s conduct would “tend to be coercive” when considered “within the totality of circumstances surrounding the occurrence at issue.”
Fifth Circuit, quoting NLRB v. Brookwood Furniture, 701 F.2d 452 (5th Cir. 1983)
The Fifth Circuit’s majority agreed that the NLRB grabbed the wrong legal tool. The National Telephone standard was never built to answer the question of whether an employer committed an unfair labor practice. It was built to answer whether workers could refuse to hand over documents. Those are different questions. The court vacated the NLRB’s order and sent it back for the board to redo the analysis using the correct “totality of circumstances” test.
Here is what the court did not decide: it did not rule that Starbucks’ conduct was legal. It did not say employers are free to subpoena union organizers’ private messages. It did not even reach the question of whether what Starbucks did was coercive. The case goes back to the NLRB, which must now answer that question using a different framework.
The court itself flagged the strange logic of the situation. The NLRB issued the subpoenas at Starbucks’ request, then turned around and ruled that issuing those subpoenas violated the law. The judges noted this “incongruity” and declined to resolve it, since the threshold error about the legal standard made that unnecessary.
The court did not say Starbucks was in the right. It said the NLRB used the wrong rulebook. The workers are back to square one.
The Non-Financial Ledger: What Money Doesn’t Capture
The court filings in this case are written in the language of legal standards and procedural tests. They don’t mention what it costs a person to receive a federal subpoena in the mail while working for $15 an hour.
Andrea Hernandez and Jazmine Cardenas organized their workplace. That is not a neutral act in a country where employers have spent decades and billions of dollars making organizing feel dangerous. It requires telling your coworkers that things could be different. It requires having conversations you know management doesn’t want you having. It requires trust, in each other and in the promise that the law is supposed to protect you while you do it.
Then the subpoenas arrived. Starbucks wanted their private messages. Their communications with union representatives. Their conversations with coworkers. The documents they had given to the federal agency that was supposed to be protecting their rights.
Even if you believe, as the Fifth Circuit majority suggested, that workers have legal tools to fight back against an overbroad subpoena, the psychological effect lands before any petition gets filed. You have been told, by your billion-dollar employer, that it wants to read your messages. That it wants to see who you talked to and what you said. That it intends to use the federal legal system to dig through the private work of your organizing campaign.
That message is received by every other worker in every other store who hears about it. You don’t have to actually get your messages read. The threat does its work. The chilling effect, the exact thing the NLRA’s anti-coercion rules were built to prevent, operates quietly. Someone decides not to sign a union card. Someone stops talking to the organizing committee. Someone decides the whole thing isn’t worth it.
The legal case may grind on for years. The damage to organizing culture is instant and cumulative.
Societal Impact: This Doesn’t Stop at One Store
Legal Precedent Risk
The Fifth Circuit’s ruling leaves the core question unanswered: can employers use federal subpoenas as a tool to expose and chill union organizing? Until the NLRB rules again and that ruling survives appeal, no organizer has a definitive answer. Corporate legal teams across every industry are watching this case.
Economic Inequality
Starbucks generated over $36 billion in global revenue in fiscal year 2023. The workers it subpoenaed were shift supervisors earning hourly wages. The ability to deploy expensive legal strategy against individual workers is a structural power gap that no labor law fully closes.
Chilling Effect on Future Organizing
Research on labor organizing consistently shows that legal threats against organizers, even unsuccessful ones, reduce the likelihood of union activity spreading. The Starbucks campaign succeeded in hundreds of locations. The subpoena strategy signals what awaits workers who try to replicate it.
Institutional Trust
When the agency meant to protect workers (the NLRB) issues the very subpoenas later used against those workers, and then is overturned for using the wrong legal test, the message to workers is clear: the system is complicated, slow, and not reliably on your side.
Service Sector Vulnerability
Starbucks workers are among the most visible organized workers in the American service sector. How this case resolves shapes the terrain for organizing in food service, retail, and gig work, industries that employ tens of millions of people with little traditional union presence.
Worker Privacy
The subpoenas targeted private communications. Not misconduct. Not fraud. Organizing conversations. The case raises a foundational question about whether workers can have any expectation of privacy in the communications that make collective action possible in the first place.
The “Cost of a Life” Metric: What Starbucks’ Legal Budget Buys
Starbucks has spent an estimated tens of millions of dollars on legal strategy related to its union fight since 2021. That figure includes outside counsel, appeals, multiple NLRB proceedings, and the lobbying infrastructure that runs alongside the legal work. Consider what that money represents in human terms:
$15 to $17 per hour. A full-time barista working 40 hours a week earns roughly $31,000 to $35,000 per year before taxes. Every dollar spent fighting workers’ right to organize is a dollar not spent raising that wage.
A single NLRB unfair labor practice case can cost an employer $100,000 to $500,000 or more in legal fees. Starbucks ran multiple simultaneous proceedings across dozens of stores, a financial drain individual workers and unions cannot match dollar for dollar.
The organizing campaigns at Starbucks locations generally sought better scheduling predictability, safer working conditions, and a seat at the table to negotiate wages. The specific La Quinta case started over allegations that Starbucks stopped workers from talking to each other.
Starbucks had access to the same federal legal process designed to protect workers. It used that process to demand workers expose their organizing communications, then spent years in federal court defending that strategy. The workers had union lawyers. Starbucks had its own legal army.
The question is not whether Starbucks broke the law. Courts haven’t fully decided that. The question is who can afford to keep asking the question until the answer goes their way.
The Numbers Behind the Green Apron
Legal Receipts: What the Record Actually Says
Section 7 of the NLRA affords employees “the right to self-organization, to form, join, or assist labor organizations, to bargain collectively through representatives of their own choosing, and to engage in other concerted activities for the purpose of collective bargaining or other mutual aid or protection.”
29 U.S.C. § 157, cited in No. 24-60500
The subpoenas sought a broad range of materials, including communications with the Union, communications with other employees about Union activity, documents provided to the Board, and statements or affidavits relating to the allegations in the complaint.
Fifth Circuit, No. 24-60500, summarizing the subpoena demands
The ALJ found that the “proper standard to apply” to determine whether the subpoenas violated Section 8(a)(1) was “that contained in National Telephone,” 319 NLRB 420.
Fifth Circuit, No. 24-60500, describing the NLRB’s legal reasoning
Because the Board considered this case under the incorrect standard, vacatur and remand are the appropriate disposition. “On remand, the Board is free to reconsider the record and make any decision supported by substantial evidence.”
Fifth Circuit, No. 24-60500, April 17, 2026, final holding
The practical meaning of these passages: the board that was supposed to protect workers used the wrong legal rulebook. The court sent it back. The workers wait. The corporation moves on.
What Now: Where This Goes and What You Can Do
Key Corporate Roles to Watch
The decisions that shaped Starbucks’ legal strategy in this case flow from the top. The relevant titles at the company include:
Sets the overall direction for how the company responds to organizing. Responsible for the culture that treats baristas as liabilities rather than people.
Oversees the legal strategy, including the decision to seek subpoenas targeting union organizers’ private communications.
Manages the company’s approach to union drives across its locations. The anti-union playbook starts here.
Approves the corporate strategy and the resources allocated to fighting unions. Every director who signed off on litigation budgets shares responsibility for this outcome.
Regulatory Bodies: The Watchlist
The primary agency responsible for enforcing labor rights. Now must re-examine this case under the correct legal standard. Watch what they decide on remand.
Oversees broader worker protection law and wage enforcement. Track their enforcement actions against major service employers.
Publicly traded companies like Starbucks must disclose material legal risks. Audit their regulatory filings for how labor litigation is characterized to investors versus workers.
The Senate HELP Committee and House Education and Workforce Committee have jurisdiction over labor law. Track whether this case generates legislative attention to close the subpoena loophole.
What Workers and Allies Can Do Right Now
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