Starbucks ramped up its ongoing anti-union campaign on Tuesday, firing a group of union activists at a Memphis store. The firings happened through the day, hitting seven workers by early afternoon—around one-third of the workforce at the store.

Workers seeking to unionize at that Memphis store were part of a powerful More Perfect Union video just last week, with a former manager at the store talking about how she quit in response to pressure to write up one of the worker-activists. A district manager “made me write up Nikki for things that I did not agree with, but she told me I had to do it or I would lose my job for not doing it,” Amy Holden said. “I did not have any proof of any of the things that Nikki did. I asked for the proof and I was not given the proof.” Holden resigned in response, and her words are particularly interesting now that union organizing committee members are being fired.

“I was fired by Starbucks today for ‘policies’ that I’ve never heard of and that I’ve never been written-up about before,” said shift supervisor Nikki Taylor in a statement. “This is a clear attempt by Starbucks to retaliate against those of us who are leading the union effort at our store and scare other partners. Starbucks will not get away with this—the entire country will be outraged.”

SB Workers United said, “Starbucks is using policies that have never been enforced, such as going behind a counter when a partner is not officially working, to fire workers. Starbucks chose to selectively enforce policies, that have not previously been consistently enforced, as a subterfuge to fire union leaders. Many of these workers did not have prior offenses or write-ups.”

A Starbucks spokesman told The New York Times’ Noam Scheiber that the workers violated company policies in the course of doing media interviews. “Among the violations, Mr. Borges said, were opening a locked door at their store; remaining inside the store without authorization after it had closed; allowing other unauthorized individuals inside the store after it had closed; and allowing unauthorized individuals in parts of the store where access is typically restricted.” Additionally, “He also wrote that one employee had opened a store safe when the employee was not authorized to do so and that another employee had failed to step in to prevent this violation.”

So those are the two accounts of what led to the firings. Here’s some context.

Firing is common in union organizing drives, even though it is illegal to fire workers for concerted activity. That includes “talking with one or more co-workers about your wages and benefits or other working conditions, circulating a petition asking for better hours, participating in a concerted refusal to work in unsafe conditions, openly talking about your pay and benefits, and joining with co-workers to talk directly to your employer, to a government agency, or to the media about problems in your workplace.” 

Nonetheless, according to an Economic Policy Institute report, “Between 19.9% and 29.6% of election filings were associated with [an unfair labor practices] charge that claimed employees were illegally fired for union activity.” It may be illegal, but it’s kind of a freebie for employers, because if an employer is found to have illegally fired someone for union activity, the only penalty is that the employer will have to rehire the person and pay back the wage minus whatever they earned in the interim. So if it takes a year for the case to be resolved, and the worker found another job and was making, say, $50 a week less than in the job they were fired from, the company would only owe $2,600. At that price, many employers decide it’s totally worth it to use a firing to get rid of a leader and intimidate other workers away from union support. Congressional Democrats have talked about dramatically increasing the fines for employers that break this law, but as of now, there simply isn’t a meaningful punishment for it.

Companies don’t usually admit they’re firing workers for illegal reasons, though. Instead, it’s a very common move to fire union supporters for policies that are technically on the books but are rarely enforced—until it becomes a convenient pretext for getting rid of someone who’s speaking out and organizing their coworkers. The question is whether other workers have done the same things without being fired.

That said, firing basically the entire union organizing committee is an audacious move. That looks like a company that is desperately trying to intimidate workers, convincing them that they cannot afford to support a union. And in a workplace the size of a Starbucks store, seven people is a significant number of “yes” votes to knock out of a union representation election.

SB Workers United plans to file an unfair labor practices complaint. But under current U.S. labor law, justice isn’t a possibility.