The U.S. Supreme Court (SCOTUS) ended its 2023-2024 term with a flurry of massive decisions, and several stand to damage the agencies designed to protect workers.

The right-wing rulings are understandably causing anxiety among progressives, including labor activists.

“While the court is decidedly pro-corporate, most Americans probably don’t know just how anti-worker and anti-union it really is,” wrote Century Foundation senior fellow Steven Greenhouse in The Guardian last month. “The justices have often shown a stunning callousness toward workers, and that means a callousness toward average Americans.”

In the Supreme Court’s June 13 decision in Starbucks Corp. v. McKinney, the justices threw out a lower court’s approval of a National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) injunction instructing the company to rehire seven fired workers at a Memphis, Tennessee, store. Starbucks said it fired the “Memphis 7” because they invited a camera crew into a closed store. The workers say they were terminated because of their unionization efforts.

The NLRB issued a complaint over the firings, asserting that Starbucks “engaged in concerted activities” to discourage union organizing. NLRB attorneys also asked a federal judge for an injunction to reinstate the workers.

“Working people have so few tools to protect and defend themselves when their employers break the law,” said Starbucks Workers United President Lynne Fox in response to the SCOTUS judgment. “That makes today’s ruling by the Supreme Court particularly egregious. It underscores how the economy is rigged against working people all the way up to the Supreme Court.”

Despite the setback, Fox underscored that the decision would not stop the organizing efforts of Starbucks workers, who had established almost 450 union Starbucks stores and filed an additional 20 petitions to join Starbucks Workers United just a week before the ruling.

The Starbucks Corp. v. McKinney decision didn’t fall along the same ideological lines as other recent SCOTUS decisions. Eight justices backed the majority opinion. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote a separate opinion that dissented on certain details but agreed with the court’s overall judgment.

However, the case did highlight an important aspect of contemporary labor fights: a reinvigorated NLRB committed to protecting workers’ rights.

The NLRB, which was created during the 1930s under the Roosevelt administration, is a........

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