Labor and the Supreme Court

Description:Trade unions, associations, and other organized economic groups formed by people who work for wages, often performing manual labor.

Significance: The Supreme Court has recognized the right of workers to organize and bargain for improved labor conditions, but it has also placed numerous restrictions on the activities of unions.

Attempts to organize in order to improve working conditions in the early 1800s were labeled "criminal conspiracies" by the courts, a doctrine imported to the United States from English common law. The courts were generally sympathetic to business, and by the mid-1800s, they began to support companies by readily issuing labor injunctions to help them deal quickly and effectively with strikes, boycotts, and picketing.

In 1894, several federal courts issued injunctions to stop the national boycott of Pullman railway cars organized by Eugene V. Debs, leader of the American Railway Union. In In re Debs (1895), the Supreme Court unanimously upheld the contempt conviction and imprisonment of Debs and several other boycott leaders for violating the injunction.

Among the tools at the courts’ disposal was the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890. The act, designed to curtail business monopolies, was also applied to unions. In Loewe v. Lawlor (1908), the Court used the provisions of the act to order the United Hatters of America, who were attempting to organize the seventy-first of eighty-two firms in the industry, to pay triple damages ensuing from a national boycott of all retailers, wholesalers, and customers.

The Clayton Act, passed by Congress in 1914, was designed to offer relief to workers from the pressures of the antitrust laws and federal injunctions. Its passage was hailed by Samuel Gompers, president of the American Federation of Labor. However, in the 1920s, the Court in effect reversed the act through a series of decisions including Duplex Printing Co. v. Deering (1921), Truax v. Corrigan (1921), and United Mine Workers v. Coronado Coal Co. (1922). In American Steel Foundries v. Tri-City Central Trades Council (1921), the Court placed limits on picketing, defining "peaceful picketing" as one person at each factory entrance and exit gate. In 1926 it also declared that strikes may have an illegal purpose (Dorchy v. Kansas).

In addition to attempting to halt the activities of unions, businesses tried to keep them from forming. In the 1890s, employers commonly required workers to sign oaths that they would refrain from any union activity. Unionists labeled these yellow dog contracts in that "only a miserable cur would ask a man to sign one, and only a dirty yellow dog would agree to sign it." Congress’s first attempt to outlaw yellow dog contracts, the Erdman Act of 1898, was nullified by the Court in Adair v. United States (1908). In Hitchman Coal and Coke Co. v. Mitchell (1917), the Court ruled that attempts to organize workers were grounds for injunction, contempt, fine, or imprisonment.

A National Policy

Although the Court had reversed the Clayton Act, in the 1930s Congress again passed legislation favorable to labor. The Norris-La Guardia Act of 1932 gave workers the statutory right to organize and bargain and restricted the use of injunctions by the federal courts. Legislators, however, were unsure whether the Court would allow the act to stand. Beginning with its decision in United States v. E. C. Knight Co. (1895), the Court’s narrow interpretation of the commerce clause prohibited federal regulation in sectors such as manufacturing (Hammer v. Dagenhart, 1918), mining (Carter v. Carter Coal Co., 1936), and farming (United States v. Butler, 1936). In Schechter Poultry Corp. v. United States (1935), the Court cited the commerce clause in overturning President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s National Industrial Recovery Act (1933), which included terms amounting to national promotion of trade unionism.

In 1937, however, in five separate cases, the Court upheld the National Labor Relations Act of 1935, which allowed workers in private industry to organize and required employers to bargain with workers’ representatives. In National Labor Relations Board v. Jones and Laughlin Steel Corp., the Court described "the close and intimate relation which a manufacturing industry may have to interstate commerce." It also termed the right of employees to organize and to select representatives of their own choosing for collective bargaining, without employer interference, as "a fundamental right." In this way, dual federalism separate state and national spheres of authority was replaced by what would become an era of growing national dominance.

Also in 1937 writing for the majority in Senn v. Tile Layers Union, Justice Louis D. Brandeis explicitly linked picketing and publicity authorized under Wisconsin law to the Fourteenth Amendment and "freedom of speech…guaranteed by the Federal Constitution." The Court extended full First Amendment protection to picketing in the 1940 landmark case Thornhill v. Alabama. However, in Milkwagon Drivers Union v. Meadowmoor Dairies (1941), the Court ruled that picketing could be restrained in the interest of public safety. The Court overturned an injunction against a union picket of one store in a privately owned shopping mall in Amalgamated Food Employees Union v. Logan Valley Plaza (1968), but Justice Potter Stewart, in Hudgens v. National Labor Relations Board (1976) argued that the constitutional guarantee of free expression did not apply when warehouse employees picketed a company’s retail store in a similar mall.

The Court also placed restrictions on strikes, ruling against sit-down strikes in National Labor Relations Board v. Fansteel Metallurgical Corp. (1939), deeming such strikes to involve the forcible seizure of property. In United States v. United Mine Workers (1947), it determined that strikes can have illegal purposes if they conflict with some other state or federal policy. The Court ruled on replacement workers during strikes in National Labor Relations Board v. McKay Radio and Telegraph Co. (1938). It distinguished between strikes resulting from an unfair labor practice committed by an employer and those in which employees walk out over a bargaining (economic) dispute. In the latter case, the employer may hire replacement workers, but if the National Labor Relations Board finds that the employer has committed an unfair labor practice, union members must be reinstated in their jobs.

Congress passed the Taft-Hartley Act in 1947, placing various restrictions on the labor movement. Among them were limits on the right of workers to select their own bargaining representatives, a requirement for labor leaders to disavow membership in the Communist Party, and a prohibition on the closed shop, whereby a person must be a union member to be hired. Union shops, in which workers must join a union within a fixed period after hire, remained legal unless the state had a right-to-work law forbidding union shops. The ruling also permitted agency shops, in which all workers are represented by a union whether or not they are members. The Court upheld these arrangements in both private and public sectors in Retail Clerks International Association Local 1625 AFL-CIO v. Schermerhorn et al. (1963) and D. Louis Abood et al. v. Detroit Board of Education (1977), respectively. In Communication Workers v. Beck (1988), the Court ruled that employees in an agency shop can pay a fee covering the cost of their representation without having to contribute money to be used by the labor organization for political or other purposes.

In 1959 Congress passed the Landrum-Griffin Act (also known as the Labor-Management Reporting and Disclosure Act), which was designed to end undemocratic practices within unions and corruption among union leaders. It also contained provisions to stop secondary boycotts.

Arbitration

The Court established judicial review of arbitration with its decision in Textile Workers Union v. Lincoln Mills (1957). It elaborated and bolstered the arbitrator’s role in three 1960 cases: United Steelworkers of America v. American Manufacturing Co., United Steelworkers of America v. Warrior and Gulf Navigation Co., and United Steelworkers of America v. Enterprise Wheel and Car Corp. The Court’s rulings in the first two emphasized the efficacy of having an arbitrator, as opposed to the courts, interpret a labor agreement. In the third, the Court identified the arbitrator as the agency most qualified to fashion an appropriate remedy. However, in Alexander v. Gardner-Denver Co. (1974), a minority employee was encouraged to pursue his grievance through both arbitration and the available judicial processes.

In Vaca v. Sipes (1967), the Court explored the limits of the duty of unions to represent all members of the bargaining unit, union members and nonmembers alike. It decided that not all grievances must go to arbitration, given the expense in money and time; the employee has the burden to prove any breach in representation. However, the Court determined in Bowen v. United States Postal Service (1983) that a union can be sued for lost wages and damages.

The Public Sector

Collective bargaining in state and local governments dates from the 1950s. A limited form was first permitted in the federal sector by presidential executive order although it did not receive statutory force until the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978. Hopes for a single, national policy framework were dashed when the Court ruled in National League of Cities v. Usery (1976) that the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 did not apply to subnational employees. Although Usery was overturned by Garcia v. San Antonio Metropolitan Transit Authority in 1985, the law remained patchwork in the 1990s.

In AFSCME, AFL-CIO v. Woodward (1969) the Court declared public employees’ right to unionize to be protected by the First and Fourteenth Amendments. Restrictions on public employees’ political activity were upheld in United States Civil Service Commission v. Letter Carriers (1973). Patronage dismissals (dismissals for being members of the wrong political party) were prohibited by the Court’s rulings in Elrod v. Burns (1976) and Branti v. Finkel et al. (1980). The right to due process before discharge was guaranteed by Cleveland Board of Education v. Loudermill in 1985. The Court extended Elrod and Branti to cover promotion, transfer, recall, and hiring decisions in 1990 with Rutan v. Republican Party of Illinois.

The Supreme Court significantly weakened labor unions in several rulings in the early twenty-first century due to the influence of a conservative majority. The concept of mandatory union fees was overturned for certain government-paid workers in Harris v. Quinn (2014). A similar case was expected to extend this ability for workers to opt out of union fees to all public sector employees in 2016 but was deadlocked due to the death of Justice Antonin Scalia. However, Republicans controversially blocked President Barack Obama's appointee, allowing his successor, President Donald Trump, to install Justice Neil Gorsuch and restore the conservative majority. This majority then ruled in a 5–4 decision on Janus v. American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees, Council 31 that mandatory union fees in the public sector violated the First Amendment. The decision was criticized by the court's liberal wing for overturning Abood v. Detroit Board of Education's forty years of precedent, and by labor advocates as a serious blow to the strength of unions. In another 5–4 decision decried by liberals, the court ruled in favor of employers' right to individual arbitration of labor disputes rather than class-action lawsuits by workers.

Bibliography

Ducat, Craig R. Constitutional Interpretation. 10th ed., Wadsworth Cengage Learning, 2013.

Goldman, Alvin L. The Supreme Court and Labor-Management Relations Law. 11th ed., Lexington Books, 1976.

Holley, William H., et al. The Labor Relations Process. 11th ed. Cengage Learning, 2017.

Kearney, Richard C. Labor Relations in the Public Sector. 5th ed. Routledge, 2017.

Scheiber, Noam. "Labor Unions Will Be Smaller After Supreme Court Decision, but Maybe Not Weaker." The New York Times, 27 June 2018, www.nytimes.com/2018/06/27/business/economy/supreme-court-unions-future.html. Accessed 5 Apr. 2023.

Sherman, Mark. "Supreme Court Deals Big Setback to Labor Unions." The Washington Post, 27 June 2018, www.washingtonpost.com/business/supreme-court-deals-big-setback-to-labor-unions/2018/06/27/3a5e07ce-7a14-11e8-ac4e-421ef7165923‗story.html. Accessed 6 July 2018.