It’s not just Hollywood where rampant unionism threatens to tear American industries apart.

Starbucks employees recently found themselves caught in a hostile battle between union leaders and company executives. Union leaders had made eye-catching promises of big pay rises. Instead, they only delivered chaos and upset.

Many ordinary Starbucks workers became fed up and decided they wanted out. They wanted to quit their union, so they proposed a vote to "decertify," meaning to remove their union representatives. What happened next has left the Starbucks employees furious.

The union, Workers United, filed motions to block the decertification votes from happening. Amazingly, the National Labor Relations Board accepted them without hesitation. Workers United and the NLRB, an agency of the federal government, appear to be in cahoots to stop Starbucks employees from quitting their union.

Decertification is a right. The NLRB must give workers the freedom to trigger a vote to quit their union as long as they get enough signatures, which the Starbucks employees did. But in this case, Workers United didn’t want to relinquish its power and its claim to represent Starbucks workers, so it filed "blocking charges," which the NLRB duly accepted.

As a result, workers’ rights are trampled. Ten separate petitions have been filed in a failed effort to decertify, but those workers are effectively trapped within Workers United, unable to escape.

The union claims it represents workers at over 200 stores and is fighting on their behalf. It arranged meetings with Starbucks management to discuss the union’s demands. No agreements have been reached. According to Starbucks, once those meetings were arranged, the union only showed up to a quarter of them.

It’s little wonder swathes of Starbucks employees want to quit Workers United. Union leaders routinely overpromise and underdeliver, enticing workers to sign up and then making it unduly difficult for them to leave.

When it comes to securing the best deal as an employee, market competition, not unions, is the best route. If the coffee store next door offers better pay and superior benefits, Starbucks employees will jump ship. Starbucks knows that, so it has to find a balance between keeping its business costs viable and holding on to talent.

The antics of Workers United have distracted from this, created anarchy, and left people worse off. There is a clear desire among the ranks of Starbucks workers to disaffiliate from their union, which they feel has failed them. They want and deserve the right to vote to decertify, to quit the union. Being denied that right sets a worrying precedent for unionized workers across the country.

The right to decertify is essential. If an elected politician performs poorly, he or she is voted out at the next election. In much the same way, Starbucks workers feel the unionists they elected to represent them have let them down, so they want the democratic freedom to depose them. Taking that right away would be tyranny.

Ultimately, the organization at fault for this unfortunate situation is the NLRB. It is the government agency responsible for maintaining workers’ rights. By failing to uphold the Starbucks employees’ right to decertify, it is at risk of violating its own charter.

If the NLRB chooses to side with out-of-control union leaders at all costs, workers can wave goodbye to their rights. Biden era precedents could further empower unions and decimate decertification rights for workers. Alternatively, the NLRB could return to the core principles it pledges to uphold and empower workers to exercise their free choice and vote to decertify. The ball is in its court.

Jason Reed ( @JasonReed624 ) is the spokesperson at Young Voices and a U.K.-based writer and broadcaster on politics and policy for a wide range of outlets.