Starbucks Corp. v. McKinney
The Supreme Court ruled that when the National Labor Relations Board asks a federal court for a temporary order during a labor dispute investigation, the court must apply the same rigorous four-factor test used for all such requests — rejecting the easier 'reasonable cause' standard that several lower courts had been using.
The decision raises the bar the NLRB must clear to win emergency relief, such as quickly reinstating fired workers while its investigation proceeds, and resolves a long-standing split among the federal courts of appeals.
How it got here: The District Court and Sixth Circuit granted the NLRB's § 10(j) injunction under a lenient two-part standard; Starbucks petitioned the Supreme Court, which took the case to resolve a split among circuit courts.
The Case in Depth
What happened
Starbucks fired several employees at a Memphis, Tennessee location after they invited a TV news crew to the store after hours to promote their union organizing campaign, which Starbucks said violated company policy. The workers' union filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board, which investigated and then asked a federal court for a temporary order requiring Starbucks to rehire the fired workers while the NLRB's own case proceeded through its administrative process.
The question before the Court
Must federal courts use the same demanding four-factor test for all preliminary injunctions when the National Labor Relations Board asks a court to step in during a workplace investigation, or can a more lenient standard apply?
The Court's answer
Yes — the traditional four-factor test governs. When the NLRB asks a federal court for a temporary order under § 10(j) of the National Labor Relations Act, the court must require the Board to show: (1) it is likely to succeed on the merits, (2) there will be serious irreparable harm without relief, (3) the balance of hardships favors relief, and (4) an injunction serves the public interest. This is the same demanding standard courts apply to any request for preliminary relief.
The Court rejected the Sixth Circuit's "reasonable cause" standard, under which courts could grant emergency relief as long as the Board's legal theory was not frivolous — without resolving factual conflicts or assessing whether the Board was actually likely to win. Nothing in § 10(j)'s text signals Congress intended to depart from traditional equitable principles. The statute's instruction to grant relief when courts "deem" it "just and proper" simply invokes ordinary judicial discretion, not a lower bar for labor cases.
Curious how the Court got there? See the step-by-step legal reasoning →
Why it matters
Workers who are fired or harassed during union organizing campaigns may have a harder time winning quick reinstatement from a federal court while the NLRB's investigation winds through its slow administrative process. The NLRB must now demonstrate it is likely to win on the merits — not just that a violation plausibly occurred — before a court will step in.
What changes now
The case returns to the Sixth Circuit to be reconsidered under the stricter Winter four-factor standard. The underlying NLRB administrative proceedings against Starbucks continue separately. Other courts that have been using the more lenient reasonable-cause standard will also need to switch to the Winter test going forward, though as Justice Jackson noted, § 10(j) injunction requests are rare — only 14 were authorized out of roughly 20,000 charges filed in a recent year.
What this does not decide
The decision does not rule on whether Starbucks committed unfair labor practices or whether the fired workers should be reinstated. It also does not explain how courts should adapt each of the four Winter factors to the specific labor-law context of § 10(j) petitions — a gap Justice Jackson's partial dissent says the majority left unanswered.
Concurrences and dissents
Concurrence in part — Justice Jackson
Justice Jackson agreed with the majority's core holding that the Winter four-factor test governs § 10(j) petitions, and she joined the judgment to vacate and remand. But she dissented from the majority's refusal to address the second step of the applicable legal framework: how the NLRA's statutory choices should inform how courts exercise their equitable discretion when applying those four factors. She argued that three features of the NLRA — the Board's role as primary adjudicator of labor disputes, its rigorous internal screening before seeking § 10(j) relief, and the deferential review courts of appeals give Board decisions — mean a district court's merits inquiry in the § 10(j) context should be 'far less searching than normal.'
How the Court got there
The legal reasoning, step by step
- The Court started from a well-established legal presumption: when Congress gives federal courts the power to grant equitable relief, courts are expected to follow the traditional rules that have governed that power for centuries. For temporary court orders (preliminary injunctions), those rules are captured in the four-factor *Winter* test — requiring the party seeking relief to show likely success on the merits, likely irreparable harm without relief, that the balance of hardships favors it, and that the public interest supports the order.
- Nothing in § 10(j)'s text overcomes this presumption. The statute simply tells courts to grant relief when they 'deem' it 'just and proper' — language that, in the Court's reading, invokes courts' traditional discretionary authority in equity rather than signaling any deliberate departure from it. The words 'just' (meaning fair) and 'proper' (meaning appropriate) are the everyday vocabulary of traditional equity practice.
- Congress knows how to modify the rules for injunctions when it wants to. Elsewhere in the same labor law, Congress required a higher showing before courts can enjoin strikes affecting national health or safety. Other federal statutes expressly relieve certain plaintiffs from proving one of the four traditional factors. Section 10(j) contains no such specific instruction, confirming that traditional rules apply.
- The Sixth Circuit's 'reasonable cause' standard was not merely a fine-tuning of the Winter test — it was a fundamentally different and far lower bar. Under that standard, courts were told not to resolve factual conflicts or make credibility judgments, and the Board only had to show its legal theory was not frivolous. The Court observed that a standard requiring only a minimally plausible legal theory would make courts little more than rubber stamps: any complaint that could survive a basic motion to dismiss would automatically justify emergency relief.
- The Board argued courts should defer to its preliminary legal and factual views because the NLRA designates the Board, not federal courts, as the primary authority over labor disputes, and courts of appeals review Board decisions deferentially. The Court rejected both points: no matter how thoroughly a district court examines the merits for preliminary-injunction purposes, the Board remains free to reach its own conclusions in its administrative proceedings — and the equitable factors like irreparable harm have nothing to do with the underlying unfair-labor-practice claim anyway.
- As for deference to the Board's litigating positions in § 10(j) petitions, the Court noted those positions are only the preliminary views of agency attorneys who filed the complaint — they are not the Board's formal legal conclusions. Deferring to what amounts to a convenient litigating posture is, in the Court's words, 'entirely inappropriate.'
Doctrinal impact
Cases affected by this decision
Reaffirms Winter v. Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc. (555 U.S. 7)
Confirmed as the governing four-factor test for all preliminary injunctions, including those sought by the NLRB under § 10(j).
Reaffirms Hecht Co. v. Bowles (321 U.S. 321)
Reaffirmed as authority for the principle that statutes authorizing equitable relief do not lightly displace traditional equitable principles.