Starbucks fired a union organizer. New York City got him rehired

theguardian.com:

A ustin Locke was halfway through his shift at the New York City Starbucks where he’d worked for three years when his supervisor ordered him into the back room. The store manager and the district manager were there too, and they had a piece of paper for him: he was fired.

“Are you sure want to do this?” Locke asked them repeatedly. He knew that what they were about to do was illegal.

It didn’t seem like a coincidence that just five days earlier, Locke had helped organize a successful vote to unionize the coffee shop, joining hundreds of other shops in a growing national movement called Starbucks Workers United. And Starbucks has been known for retaliating against those involved.

But the Seattle-based coffee company said Locke was fired for forgetting to sign a log after getting his temperature checked for Covid – something that many other workers regularly forgot as well. The company also accused the 28-year-old of making a false report about a supervisor physically pushing to keep him out of a meeting – an incident caught on security footage that Starbucks refused to look at.

Locke was fired last July and if it had happened in another American city, there’s a chance that would have been the end of it. Most employment in the US operates according to a nightmarish legal doctrine called “at-will”, meaning companies can fire you over almost anything. While it’s illegal to fire someone for organizing a union, or over characteristics such as race, gender or disability, a boss can legally justify axing you for just about any other reason – maybe they don’t like your haircut or your music taste, or they think you laugh too loud. And if you think your firing may have broken the law, the burden is on you to provide the evidence –