As reported by CBS News, the Supreme Court has agreed to hear Starbucks' appeal of a court order requiring the coffee chain to reinstate seven employees at one of its stores in Memphis, Tennessee, that a federal agency found were fired for pro-union activities.
The baristas, dubbed the "Memphis Seven," contend they were fired for participating in a high-profile effort to organize a union, and filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board. A federal judge ordered Starbucks to rehire the workers in 2022, with a federal appeals court affirming the decision last year.
At issue is the standard used for court injunctions requested by the NLRB in their legal sparring with employers in administrative proceedings.
Starbucks claims certain courts are granting the NLRB too much leeway, with differing appeals court rulings sending a mixed message to employees nationwide, which "unacceptably threatens the uniformity of federal labor law," Starbuck's attorneys wrote to the Supreme Court.
The seven workers were terminated after publicly posting a letter to Starbucks' CEO and also inviting a TV news crew into their Memphis store in January 2022 to discuss their union work.
Starbucks contended it terminated the workers for violating a safety policy by opening the store after hours without approval and letting unauthorized people inside.
A decision in the case is considered likely by the end of June.
YouTube Cuts 100 Employees
Google laid off 100 employees at its video platform YouTube this week, continuing piecemeal layoffs after shedding more than a thousand jobs in the past week, according to the New York Times.
The tech giant notified workers from YouTube’s operations and creator management teams on Wednesday that their positions had been eliminated, according to an email reviewed by the Times.
“We’ve made the decision to eliminate some roles and say goodbye to some of our teammates,” YouTube’s chief business officer Mary Ellen Coe wrote in a note to employees at the organization. “Anyone in the Americas” and the Asia-Pacific region “who is or may be impacted will be notified by the end of day today,” the note said.
The layoffs affect groups of employees who offer support to YouTube’s millions of content creators. The Times reported YouTube, the world’s most popular video service, employed 7,173 people as of Tuesday.
Study: Remote Work Doesn’t Seem to Affect Productivity
U.S. industries that are more adaptable to remote work haven’t seen a bigger boost — or decline — in productivity growth since 2020 compared to industries with more in-person work, according to a study by the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco.
Bloomberg reported the researchers examined productivity trends in 43 industries — including chemical manufacturing, retail trade, and accommodation and food services — and assigned a “teleworkability” score based on the occupational mix of each industry and the share of jobs that can be done remotely.
“If remote work boosts productivity in a substantial way, then it should improve productivity performance, especially in those industries where teleworking is easy to arrange and widely adopted, such as professional services, compared with those where tasks need to be performed in person, such as restaurants,” wrote the study authors, which included San Francisco Fed economists led by John Fernald.
After controlling for pre-pandemic trends by industry, they found little statistical relationship between productivity and the prevalence of remote work since the pandemic.
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