On Tuesday the Fifth Circuit handed down its ruling in the Starbucks union case out of Sylmar, California, and you have to read it twice to believe the shape of it. The court looked at what the company did to a worker named Untaran during the 2022 organizing drive and agreed, on the record, that Starbucks broke the law. It agreed a manager illegally threatened him over the union. It agreed he was illegally interrogated about it. The judges signed their names to all of that. And then the same worker got fired, and the court turned around and said you can’t actually prove the firing had anything to do with the union, because — and this is the whole holding — “timing alone is not substantial evidence of anti-union animus.”
Sit with the logic for a second, because it’s the entire game. A company can threaten you for organizing. It can pull you into a back room and grill you about who’s signing cards. Both illegal, both established as fact in this very ruling. Then it can fire you a short while later, and the court will treat that firing as a blank slate, a fresh event with no history, as if the threats and the interrogation happened to some other guy in some other year. The only thing that would count as proof is a manager dumb enough to write “fired for union activity” on the termination form. Nobody has done that since roughly 1935. So the standard isn’t a standard. It’s an instruction manual for how to retaliate and get away with it: do the union-busting out loud, then do the firing quietly, and let a federal court tell the worker the two are unrelated.
This is the part people are pointing at when they say the law is on the boss’s side. It isn’t an attitude. It’s a procedure, and the procedure just ran in open court. The labor board, for all its limits, looked at the same facts and saw what any human being sees: you don’t threaten and interrogate a man over the union and then fire him by accident. The court saw a man who couldn’t produce a confession. Untaran organized a coffee shop, the company came after him exactly the way the statute says it can’t, and the machine still spat him out the far end with a ruling that calls the obvious a coincidence. The cards keep getting signed anyway, store after store, which tells you the workers already know what the court won’t admit — that the firing was the point, and everybody in that Sylmar back room knew it.