Starbucks Can Limit Number of Pro-Union Buttons Worn by Employees

The Second Circuit Court of Appeals has determined that Starbucks Corp.
did not violate federal labor law by adopting a dress code which limits the
number of pro-union buttons its employees can wear on their uniforms. NLRB
v. Starbucks Corp., Nos. 10-3511, 10-3783 (2d Cir., decided May
10, 2012).

The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) had ruled that multiple pro-union
buttons, at one-inch in diameter, “did not seriously harm Starbucks’s legitimate interest in employee image because ‘the Company not only
countenanced but encouraged employees to wear multiple buttons as part
of that image.’ These other buttons, the Board found, were not immediately
recognizable by customers as company-sponsored, and the pro-union
pins at issue were ‘no more conspicuous than the panoply of other buttons
employees displayed.’”

Reversing this part of NLRB’s determination, the appeals court said that it had
gone too far. “Starbucks is clearly entitled to oblige its employees to wear
buttons promoting its products, and the information contained on those
buttons is just as much a part of Starbucks’s public image as any other aspect
of its dress code,” said the court. “But the company is also entitled to avoid
the distraction from its messages that a number of union buttons would
risk.” The record apparently showed that one employee tried to display eight
union pins “on her pants, shirts, hat, and apron. Wearing such a large number
of union buttons would risk serious dilution of the information contained on
Starbucks’s buttons, and the company has a ‘legitimate, recognized managerial
interest’ . . . in preventing its employees from doing so.”