Starbucks has displayed “egregious and widespread misconduct” in its dealings with employees involved in efforts to unionize Buffalo, New York, stores, a National Labor Relations Board judge said in an order Wednesday.As a result, the company must reinstate and make whole a number of workers who were let go from locations in or around Buffalo, among other remedies, NLRB administrative law judge Michael Rosas said.The case includes 32 unfair labor charges made by Workers United against the company for its actions between August 2021 and July 2022 at 21 stores in the Buffalo area, including the first Starbucks location to unionize.The company, which has been facing a wave of unionization across the country since December 2021, must also post a notice in its stores nationally, the judge ruled. That notice informs workers that they have the right to join a union, and lays out a lengthy list of what the company will refrain from doing, like surveilling workers or making other efforts to dissuade union activity.Rosas also said that interim CEO Howard Schultz and another company leader must read the notice to employees, or be present at a meeting where the rights are read.Schultz, who will soon hand over the reins to incoming CEO Laxman Narasimhan, has been a vocal opponent of the union since he rejoined the company as interim CEO last year.“I don’t think a union has a place in Starbucks,” Schultz recently told CNN’s Poppy Harlow. If workers “file for a petition to be unionized, they have a right to do so. But we as a company have a right also to say, we have a different vision that is better,” he said.Schultz recently declined a request from U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont and the rest of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee to testify in an upcoming hearing on Starbucks’ compliance with labor laws. Starbucks said its chief public affairs officer AJ Jones II will attend instead.For union leaders, Wednesday’s order was a win.“This is truly a historic ruling,” Gary Bonadonna Jr., manager of the Rochester Regional Joint Board of Workers United, SEIU, said in a statement issued by Starbucks Workers United. “We will not rest until every Starbucks worker wins the right to organize.”Michelle Eisen, a worker who was among those that Starbucks must make whole according to Wednesday’s order, said “this decision results from months of tireless organizing by workers in cafes across the country demanding better working conditions in the face of historical, monumental, and now deemed illegal union-busting.”Both parties have until March 28 to appeal the decision, according to the NLRB.Starbucks said in a statement that it is “considering all options to obtain further legal review,” adding that “we believe the decision and the remedies ordered are inappropriate given the record in this matter.”

The National Nurses Union applauded President Joe Biden's proposal to require that companies with more than 100 employees vaccinate their work force. The American Federation of Teachers once said vaccine mandates weren't necessary, but now embraces them. In Oregon, police and firefighter unions are suing to block a mask mandate for state workers.

The labor movement is torn over vaccine requirements — much like the country as a whole — wanting to both support its political ally in Biden and protect its members against infection but also not wanting to trample their workers' rights.

"Labor unions are a microcosm of the society we live in," said Patricia Campos-Medina, executive director of Cornell University's The Worker Institute. "The same political divide we have right now exists within the rank and file of unions."

Video above: Biden announces sweeping new vaccine rules

That divide complicates matters for Biden as he tries to get the delta variant under control. Unions are a key part of the Democratic Party, and Biden has embraced them to burnish his blue-collar, middle-class image. Dissent in Biden's own coalition may make it especially hard for him to implement new vaccination requirements. Some unions representing federal workers already objected to his push for inoculation among the U.S. government workforce, saying such matters involving new workplace requirements and discipline need to be negotiated at the bargaining table.

In a sign of the importance of the issue to the Biden administration, the White House reached out to union presidents before Biden announced his new policy Thursday and will continue to check in with labor leaders, said an administration official, who insisted on anonymity to discuss forthcoming plans.

Biden will require companies with more than 100 workers to give their employees shots or test them weekly. He will also mandate shots for executive branch workers and federal contractors with no testing opt-out. The new requirements could cover 100 million Americans.

Momentum seems to be on the side of mandates. The AFL-CIO, the umbrella organization over much of the country's unions, praised mandates and Biden's plan in a statement released Friday. "The resurgence of COVID-19 requires swift and immediate action, and we commend President Biden for taking additional steps to help put an end to this crisis. Everyone should be vaccinated — as one step in stopping the pandemic," the organization's president, Liz Shuler, said in the statement.

The AFT two weeks ago mandated that its employees in its offices be vaccinated and has become a strong advocate of workplaces requiring vaccinations. "Safety and health have been our north star since the beginning of the pandemic," said Randi Weingarten, the union's president. The union's support for mandates, she added, "creates great cheer among two-thirds of our people and will create agita in one-third of the people."

Still, many labor leaders are hesitant to wade into the mandate issue. Many of the employers of the workers of the Laborer's District Council of Western Pennsylvania, like hospitals, have begun requiring vaccinations. Whenever members complain, the council's business manager, Phillip Ameris, tells them it's not the union's call.

"What we have said is, 'we encourage our members to the get the vaccine,' but what we're telling everyone to do is to go to your physician," Ameris said. "We're trying to keep it nonpolitical. ... Go to your doctor and ask your doctor what is best for you."

Some of the most heated opposition has come from law enforcement unions. In Newark on Thursday, police and fire unions from across New Jersey protested against the mayor's vaccine mandate outside city hall. Police unions from Chicago to Richmond have pushed back against mandates in their cities. In Portland, Oregon, the local police union got its members exempted from the city's vaccine order and a group of police and firefighter unions is suing Gov. Kate Brown to block the state's vaccine requirement for its workers.

Simon Haeder, a political scientist who studies vaccine mandates at Penn State University, said it makes sense that the strongest resistance has come from police and firefighters. "The more conservative side of the labor movement, in terms of politics, are going to be the police and firefighter unions," he said, noting that response to the coronavirus has become highly polarized. "Yes, you're a union person and yes, you want the workplace to get back to normal, but the identity of being a Republican outweighs a lot of those things."

Bill Johnson, executive director of the National Association of Police Organizations, said police officers are reacting like most Americans. "You've got, like in the rest of the country, really strong feelings on both sides," Johnson said.

Still, police unions can see the writing on the wall — and want any mandates to be negotiated through the collective bargaining process, Johnson said. "There's a sense from the union perspective that vaccination policy is pretty much going to be mandated," he said. "We want a place at the table when we discuss implementation."

Campos-Medina said mandatory vaccination is such an obviously important public health policy that she expects unions to ultimately accept it. She compared it to bans on indoor smoking, which rankled some unions years ago but is a subject that hardly ever comes up at the bargaining table today. "We will get there," she said.

Weingarten's union had initially, like Biden, opposed vaccine mandates and said persuading workers to get their shots was a better approach. But after the delta variant kicked caseloads higher this summer and filled up hospital beds, AFT reconsidered.

She, too, thinks unions will almost all ultimately coalesce behind a pro-mandate position. But, she notes, it will take time.

"The leadership in unions I talk to know that vaccines are really important," Weingarten said. "What they're trying to do is balance between all these different services and responsibilities we have to our members."

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Associated Press writers Josh Boak in Washington and Marc Levy in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, contributed to this report.

Video above: NYC teachers' union protests vaccine mandate

The biggest victory for U.S. unions since Labor Day last year wasn't at the negotiating table, on the picket line or in organizing a vote. It was in the 2020 presidential election.

In Joe Biden, organized labor has the most pro-union president since at least Lyndon Johnson, or perhaps ever, depending upon who you ask.

And unions are actually more popular now than they've been since their heyday. A survey by Gallup released last week found that 68% of respondents have a positive view of unions — the best reading for that question dating back to 1965, and up from only 48% in 2009. Younger workers are even bigger backers of unions, with 77% of those 34 and younger having a positive view.

"I think because of the pandemic, the country has taken a second look at unions and they like what they see," said Tim Schlittner, communications director for the AFL-CIO union federation. "Workers are finding power in each other. And this is a moment of great opportunity for the labor movement to build on this momentum and grow our ranks."

There is also a generally more positive environment for workers today, with more job openings than job candidates resulting in rising wages in many sectors of the economy. But despite that, the very union-friendly administration and growing popularity, 2021 was once again a tough year for the nation's unions — which represent only a small sliver of U.S. workers and are having trouble growing their numbers.

"U.S. unions are in a much weaker position than they were in the 50s, 60s, 70s," said Alexander Colvin, dean of Cornell University's Industrial and Labor Relations School. "There's opportunities now to revitalize, but it's an opportunity, not a reality yet."

US union membership near record low

Unions ended 2020 with less than 11% of workers in their ranks, roughly half the share of U.S. workers than in 1983 when the Labor Department started tracking the figure.

And although that percentage was up slightly from a year earlier, that's only because non-union workers lost their jobs at a slightly higher rate during the pandemic than unionized workers. The number of union members actually fell slightly in 2020, the most recent year for which data is available.

The picture is somewhat better in the public sector, where roughly one-of-three government workers, such as teachers, police or firefighters, are members of a union. But in the private sector only 6% of workers are unionized. And changing that in a meaningful way is obviously going to be difficult.

The biggest recent setback was likely the failed attempt to win an organizing election at an Amazon warehouse in Alabama by the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union. Less than 30% of employees at the warehouse voted earlier this year to be represented by the union.

Union supporters claim this is a sign that the rules are stacked against them in attempts to organize businesses.

"There is a much higher share of workers who would want a union in their work place," said Celine McNicholas, director of government affairs at the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank that gets 17% of its financial support from labor unions. "What the Amazon vote shows is how broken the system is."

Push for labor law reform

Unions are making a major push for a reform of labor laws through the Protecting the Right to Organize Act, or PRO Act, that union supporters say will level the playing field on representation votes. The legislation was recently renamed to add the name of Richard Trumka, the outspoken and charismatic president of the AFL-CIO who died a month ago.

The legislation would allow for fines of up to $50,000 against employers who are found to have violated employees' rights during an organizing campaign, such as firing them for supporting an organizing effort. The bill also allows the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) to order an employer to recognize a union if it finds that management interfered with the election and a majority of employees have signed cards indicating they support a union.

But despite the fact that the legislation has passed the House and is co-sponsored by nearly all the Democrats in the Senate, it will be difficult to get it passed without eliminating the filibuster. Supporters are more hopeful parts of the bill can be included in budget measures that require only a simple majority of the Senate to pass.

Opponents of the measure say despite the difficulty of passing the law, they are concerned that parts of the legislation will come to pass in the Democrat-controlled Congress. Mark Mix, president of the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, which fights efforts to require employees to pay union dues if they object to doing so, said despite unions representing only a tiny minority of workers, they still wield tremendous power in Washington.

"They have power out of all proportion to their numbers," he said. "They're a political force. To say the deck is stacked against them is just not true. They have the Democrats in their back pocket."

What Biden's win meant for unions

The wins that President Biden has provided to unions have been low-profile but important, including putting union-friendly appointees in charge of the NLRB.

Among the decisions the board will make soon is whether or not there will be a new unionization vote at the Amazon warehouse in Alabama. Last month an NLRB hearing officer agreed with union objections to several of the actions that Amazon management took during the previous vote, and recommended a new election.

Among the first day moves that Biden made upon taking office on Jan. 20 was firing Peter Robb as general counsel of the NLRB, a powerful position little known outside of labor law circles.

Robb, a longtime management-side lawyer, most notably served as the lead attorney in the watershed case after President Ronald Reagan fired the striking members of the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization in 1981, a move widely seen as a catalyst for management assault on unions.

Upon being named general counsel by President Donald Trump in 2017, Robb said he was committed not only to protecting the rights of employees to engage in union activities, but also the "rights of employees to refrain from such activities." Union opponents such as the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation saw him as their champion. His replacement, Jennifer Abruzzo, had previously been a union lawyer.

Biden has since named additional members to the NLRB, giving Democrats control of the board.

"There's a lot of stuff decided by the NLRB in terms of how labor law works that doesn't get a lot of attention," said Colvin. "It makes a big difference when you go from a pro-management to pro-union."

Opposition to Biden among rank-and-file

Despite the alliance between union leadership and many Democrats, 40% of voters from union households voted for Trump in the 2020 election, according to polling from Roper.

That's down only slightly from the 43% who voted for Trump in 2016, and roughly the same as the proportion who voted for Republican presidential candidates in the other elections this century. The AFL-CIO, which surveyed union members as opposed to voters from union households, estimates that 37% voted for Trump in each of the last two elections.

"That chasm between union officials and their agenda and the agenda of rank-and-file across the country are getting wider and wider," Mix said.