In April 2022, a Starbucks barista and union organizer was invited to meet with the company’s upper management in Long Beach. During the meeting, the employee raised several concerns, including charges of unfair labor practices the company faced.

Howard Schultz, who had just begun his third stint as the company’s chief executive, became irritated and shot back: “If you’re not happy at Starbucks, you can go work for another company.”

Now, the National Labor Relations Board has found that Schultz acted unlawfully by inviting an employee to quit after they raised issues related to unionization.

The board’s decision, issued Oct. 2, ordered Starbucks to cease and desist from implying employees could be fired for engaging in protected activities such as union organizing. The company must also post a notice of employee rights at all of the Long Beach stores from which employees attended the meeting with Schultz.

In its decision, the board wrote that it has “long held unlawful employers’ statements that employees dissatisfied with working conditions should quit rather than try to improve them through union activity.”

Starbucks did not immediately respond to a request for comment regarding the NLRB’s Long Beach decision, which comes as the coffee chain has changed its stance on unionization efforts.

Until this year, the company had ardently resisted the campaign to organize its workers, which began in 2021. Federal labor regulators found Starbucks repeatedly violated labor laws by disciplining and firing workers involved in unionizing activity, shutting down stores and stalling contract negotiations.

But in February the company announced it had agreed with the union behind the campaign, Starbucks Workers United, to streamline negotiations on contracts and take a more neutral approach when workers at unionized stores took steps to organize.

Earlier this week, the unionization drive reached a milestone, when a store in Washington became the 500th U.S. location to unionize. Starbucks Workers United has credited the company’s new posture for a wave of some 100 Starbucks stores that have unionized since March.

“We’re happy to see the NLRB continue to stand up for workers and our legal right to organize. At the same time, we’re focused on the future and are proud to be charting a new path with the company,” Michelle Eisen, national organizing committee co-chair at Starbucks Workers United and a barista at a Buffalo, N.Y., store, said in an emailed statement about the decision on Schultz’s comment.

Starbucks spokesperson Phil Gee said the company disagreed with the decision, and that sessions such as the one held with baristas in Long Beach and other locations across the country aimed to gather input from workers.

“Our focus continues to be on training and supporting our managers to ensure respect of our partners’ rights to organize and on progressing negotiations towards ratified store contracts this year,” Gee said in emailed statement Friday.

Beyond charges from federal regulators and other fallout from its earlier anti-union approach, the company is grappling with a change in leadership, softening demand, boycotts over its perceived support for Israel, pressures from activist investors and criticism that it has strayed far from its roots with menus of overly complicated items that take too long to serve. Sales in North American stores dipped 2%, and sales in the rest of the world dipped 7%, the company reported in July.

Schultz stepped down last year and in August the company named a new chief executive, Brian Niccol, to replace Schultz’s successor. Niccol has said he’ll stick with the company’s new position on unions.

“I deeply respect the right of partners to choose, through a fair and democratic process, to be represented by a union,” Niccol wrote in a letter addressed to union members and posted on the company’s website last week. “I am committed to making sure we engage constructively and in good faith with the union and the partners it represents.”

Niccol penned the remarks in response to a letter signed by hundreds of workers who serve as bargaining delegates from various stores for the union. The workers reached out ahead of a scheduled bargaining session, the first of Niccol’s tenure.

Still, workers’ views on whether to unionize is not unanimous.

As employees at the store in Washington were voting to join the union, workers at a Starbucks in Hollywood on Monday chose not to join. Also on that day, a store in Salt Lake City failed to secure votes needed to win union recognition.

The NLRB has conducted a total of 602 union elections at Starbucks stores, with 102 of them falling short and 500 passing, according to NLRB spokesperson Kayla Blado. In California, 61 stores have held union elections and 41 of them have had their bargaining units recognized by the labor board.

At the Hollywood store, pro-union workers had been optimistic ahead of the vote count, which came out 14 opposed to unionization to 6 favoring it. The workers had reached out to union officials in February, frustrated by problems of chronic understaffing.

Mikey Martinez, a shift supervisor who has worked at the store for more than five years, said he was fearful when he and co-workers began talking about unionizing. But his initial concerns about backlash dissipated after managers held a meeting about a month ago to explain the company’s new, more neutral stance.

It was “really good to be able to speak about it without checking behind our shoulders to see if anyone is listening,” Martinez said.

An unexpectedly large surge in new job creation and a down-tick in unemployment last month was good news for the economy, for the Federal Reserve and for Democratic politicians because it suggested policymakers have managed, thus far, to curb inflation without triggering a recession.

The addition of 254,000 jobs in September, reported by the government Friday, was well above the average 203,000 monthly gains over the past year. It blew past analysts’ expectations and indicated that the economy has more legs than previously thought, despite a worrisome slowdown in hiring over the past summer.

At the same time, the unemployment rate dropped to 4.1% from 4.2% in August.

Employers in an array of industries added to their payrolls, led by eating and drinking businesses, healthcare and government. Construction payrolls rose over the month, as did retail. Manufacturing and transportation and warehousing jobs, however, declined slightly, and there was little change in business services and information, which includes the struggling film industry.

“The report doesn’t single-handedly change the landscape for the economic outlook, but it does provide reassurance that there’s still plenty of life in the jobs market,” said Jim Baird, chief investment officer with Plante Moran Financial Advisors, a major accounting firm based in the Detroit area.

The strong hiring in September, plus a pickup in wage gains to a 4% annual pace — notably faster than the rate of inflation — comes on the heels of the Federal Reserve’s big, half-point reduction in interest rates last month, the first rate cut since 2020. With inflation now seemingly under control, the central bank is focusing on supporting the job market.

After Friday’s report, most analysts say they expect a quarter-point cut at its next meeting in early November. Stocks initially jumped on news of the latest employment numbers, then dropped and rose again in a volatile day on Wall Street.

The monthly jobs report is viewed as the single most important economic indicator. The October report will be released Nov. 1, a few days before the Fed meeting and the national election in which the economy has been a top concern for voters.

The September employment statistics for states won’t be released until later in the month. California’s latest jobless figure was 5.3% in August, the second highest in the nation, although job growth in recent months has been keeping pace with the national rate.

At this late point in the political calendar, new economic reports aren’t likely to sway a lot of voters, who typically have locked up their candidate of choice by the summer. Polls suggest that the lingering effects of inflation have cast a shadow over the economy in the minds of many voters, but the labor market has rarely been as resilient — and that goes for most key battleground states.

Through August, Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina and Pennsylvania all have lower unemployment rates than the country’s 4.2% in August, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. And their pace of job growth has been as strong if not stronger than the national average.

Wisconsin’s jobless rate was just 2.9% in August, and while Nevada has the highest unemployment in the land, at 5.5%, the state is adding jobs at double the speed of the country. Meanwhile, Michigan’s unemployment and job-growth rates are slightly worse off than for the U.S. as a whole.

“If people are looking at the labor market, I would think they would have to be pretty happy,” said Dean Baker, an economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, who like other analysts were worried after the jobless rate rose to 4.3% in July from 3.7% at the start of the year. But after Friday’s report, he said, “This is a really low unemployment rate by historical standards, and most of the swing states are doing even better.”

Baker said the job market has been bolstered by federal spending and investments, as well as larger inflows of immigrants, who, while stirring fresh controversies, also have filled many jobs.

The future may be a bit cloudy, with the conflict in the Middle East and uncertainties hanging over the election Nov. 5. Also, the October job numbers could be affected by the devastating effects of Hurricane Helene and the Boeing strike if that persists, even as the suspension of the large-scale picketing by dockworkers removed another potential hit to the employment numbers.

Cory Stahle, economist for Indeed Hiring Lab, said next month’s report may not be so reassuring, reflecting the fluctuation in the data month to month. But “the labor market isn’t on the brink of collapse,” he said, although adding that Fed interest rate cuts may be needed to sustain the momentum.

“Another half-point cut in the interest rate in November is now out of the question; a quarter-point cut is likely,” said Sung Won Sohn, professor of economics and finance at Loyola Marymount University. “The central bank will proceed with a series of small cuts in the interest rate.”

Heath Evans really needed his Sonos speakers to work.

He and his wife counted on one of the three wireless devices he owned to play lullabies to help put their baby daughter to sleep.

So, in May, when Sonos released a new controller app that was so riddled with problems he couldn’t get the speakers to work, Evans was angry.

“We just need reliable music that plays lullabies while we’ve got a screaming baby trying to go to sleep,” said Evans, a 40-year-old entrepreneur in Australia who had received the speakers from his wife last year for his birthday.

Fed up with the time Sonos has taken to fully fix the app, the family has given up on trying to use the devices, which cost about $1,300. They’ve turned instead to a cheap speaker to stream music for their daughter’s bedtime.

Evans is among a legion of unhappy customers who are upset with Santa Barbara-based Sonos. Today, the company is still trying to mitigate the fallout from the app debacle and salvage its reputation as a powerhouse in the audio industry offering an array of portable, high-quality wireless speakers. The hit to Sonos’ brand has swung the door open for rivals such as Amazon, Bose, Apple and other tech giants that make smart speakers to capture more of the business’ customers.

“Sonos knows it is on precarious ground because while it has built up customer goodwill, it plays in a highly competitive space,” said Dipanjan Chatterjee, vice president and principal analyst at research firm Forrester in an email.

Over its more than 20 years, the publicly traded company has weathered tough times before, including the 2008 financial crisis. But its latest misstep is a multimillion-dollar blunder that has forced it to delay the launch of new products and lower sales projections for the pivotal final months of the year when they otherwise would be looking to capitalize on a holiday sales boost.

Sonos said it’s spending $20 million to $30 million to fix the app and provide more customer support — an emergency investment it hopes will win back the trust of customers and steady its financial footing. In the last six months, the company’s stock, which ended trading Thursday at $11.58, has fallen 39%. In the quarter ending June 29, it reported $397 million in revenue, a 6% increase over the same period last year, and $3.7 million in net income.

This week, the company outlined a plan to make sure it doesn’t have similar failures in the future, including improvements to how it tests products before they’re released, the appointment of a “quality ombudsperson,” creation of a customer advisory board, and extending its warranty for certain items, such as its home theater and plug-in speaker products. Executives agreed to forgo their annual bonuses for 2025 unless their turnaround plan succeeds.

“There are many wonderful brands that have made missteps, have gone out and apologized to fix things and won back the trust of their customers,” said Eddie Lazarus, Sonos’ chief strategy officer. “We’re going to be the next one in that line.”

Sonos was founded in 2002 by a group of entrepreneurs who set out to build something that is commonplace today but pioneering at the time: a wireless audio system that would enable people to play music over the internet anywhere in their home. They were working years before the start of popular streaming services such as Spotify and Pandora, as well as the launch of the iPhone.

In January 2005, the company released the ZP100, a device with a remote control that allowed people to stream music through their computers. The product garnered positive reviews including from Walt Mossberg, a tech columnist at the Wall Street Journal, who called the Sonos music streaming system “easily the best music-streaming product I have seen and tested.”

As in many startups, Sonos executives were worried about competitors . The first song played publicly on the ZP100 was the Beastie Boys’ “No Sleep Till Brooklyn,” a tune engineers could relate to as they hustled to improve the quality of the device before its release.

Appearing on the podcast “How I Built This with Guy Raz” this year, one of the founders, John MacFarlane, recalled the pressure he and others felt to unveil their first product in time for the holiday season — a goal they ultimately missed. Releasing the ZP100 before it was ready would have “killed the company,” he said.

“You had to have a great positive first experience if you’re going to build the brand on word of mouth,” MacFarlane said.

The challenge of striking a balance between moving fast and having a good product is still a challenge that Sonos and other tech companies have grappled with throughout their history. Apple faced backlash from its customers in 2012 when it released a Maps app that contained inaccurate driving directions, Chatterjee said. But Sonos is in a “trickier” spot because the app is part of what makes the company’s audio system function seamlessly for the 15 million households that use its products globally.

“Without that seamlessness, there is no ease of use, and without the ease of use, the company cannot command its premium price with consumers or its premium position in the market,” he said.

Sonos Chief Executive Patrick Spence has acknowledged that the company has let down its customers. He told investors in August after Sonos released its quarterly earnings that the company had to rebuild the app to address “performance and reliability issues” and position the company for growth as the company expands “into new categories and move ambitiously outside of the home.” Sonos released its first pair of headphones in June.

For some Sonos customers like Evans, Sonos’ response has been “tone deaf,” underscoring the trust the company still needs to win back.

“Why on earth would I care about a quality ombudsman? I’m a guy sitting in Melbourne nursing a baby in Australia with a speaker that doesn’t work,” he said.

Despite looking at the possibility of bringing back the previous version of the Sonos app, Lazarus said the company ruled it out because there were a lot of “technical concerns.” While the company has said it’s reintroduced many of the features from the old version of the app that were missing in the new one, he acknowledged the company still has work to do. He couldn’t say when the app will be completely fixed.

Other customers have found workarounds to still stream their music from their Sonos speakers even if the app doesn’t work.

Fearing issues with the rollout of the new app, 32-year-old product designer Matthew Mocniak said, he disabled his Sonos system from automatically updating the app but the solution worked only temporarily.

Mocniak, who lives in North Carolina and has spent more than $2,000 on Sonos speakers, said he’s able to stream music through Apple’s Airplay feature.

As someone who works in the tech industry, Mocniak knows rebuilding software can be harder than it looks. “It’s very easy to promise certain features or certain deadlines,” he said. “It’s also easy to forget that there are people responsible for that stuff on the other side.”

Ben Brown, a 49-year-old creative director in the United Kingdom, said his Sonos app still says his speakers are not connected. Instead, he’s been using Amazon’s Alexa assistant to play music on the speakers.

Brown, who also purchased multiple Sonos speakers for his home, said he was so frustrated that he felt the urge to throw the Sonos Roam portable speaker in the sea while on vacation.

“I would never have done it, really, but that’s how angry it makes you,” he said. “It’s those moments where you just want to take a speaker outside, eat some dinner and listen to some music.”