Reuters (“US Supreme Court hands defeat to organized labor in truckers strike case“):
The U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday dealt another setback to organized labor by making it easier for employers to sue over strikes that cause property destruction in a ruling siding with a concrete business in Washington state that sued the union representing its truck drivers after a work stoppage.
The 8-1 decision overturned a lower court’s ruling that said the lawsuit filed by Glacier Northwest Inc, which sells and delivers ready-mix concrete, against a local affiliate of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters was preempted by a U.S. law called the National Labor Relations Act. Glacier Northwest is a unit of Japan-based Taiheiyo Cement Corp.
Glacier Northwest filed a lawsuit in Washington state court accusing the union of intentional property destruction during a 2017 strike.
A group of drivers went on strike while their mixing trucks were filled with concrete. Although the drivers kept their mixing drums rotating to delay the concrete from hardening and damaging the vehicles, the company was forced to discard the unused product at a financial loss.
The Washington state Supreme Court in 2021 ruled that the company’s claims were preempted by a statute called the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), saying the company’s loss of concrete was incidental to a strike that could be considered arguably protected under federal labor law.
Conservative Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who wrote the ruling, said the union’s actions had not only destroyed the concrete but had also “posed a risk of foreseeable, aggravated and imminent harm to Glacier’s trucks.”
“Because the union took affirmative steps to endanger Glacier’s property rather than reasonable precautions to mitigate that risk, the NLRA does not arguably protect its conduct,” Barrett wrote.
Liberal Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, in a 27-page dissent, wrote that the ruling “is likely to cause considerable confusion among the lower courts” about how preemption under the National Labor Relations Act should apply in future cases and “risks erosion of the right to strike.”
The Supreme Court, with its 6-3 conservative majority, has leaned toward curbing the power of labor unions in rulings in recent years.
The justices in 2021 struck down a California agricultural regulation aimed at helping unions organize workers. The court in 2018 ruled that non-members cannot be forced, as they are in certain states, to pay fees to unions representing public employees such as police and teachers that negotiate collective bargaining agreements with employers.
Noel Francisco, the lawyer who represented Glacier Northwest in the case decided on Thursday, said the ruling “vindicates the longstanding principle that federal law does not shield labor unions from tort liability when they intentionally destroy an employer’s property.”
Teamsters General President Sean O’Brien said the Supreme Court had “again voted in favor of corporations over working people.”
NPR, though, gives an entirely different impression of the ruling (“Unions are relieved as the Supreme Court leaves the right to strike intact“):
The U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday handed a victory to business interests in a labor dispute, but the win was more of a whimper than a roar.
By an 8-to-1 vote, the high court ruled against unionized truck drivers who walked off the job, leaving their trucks loaded with wet concrete, but it preserved the rights of workers to time their strikes for maximum effect.
“Virtually every strike is based on timing that will hurt the employer,” said Stanford Law School professor William Gould, a former chairman of the National Labor Relations Board, and there was “great concern that the court would rule broadly to limit the rights of strikers. “But that didn’t happen,” he noted in an interview with NPR.
At first glance, the Supreme Court did seem poised to issue a decision more damaging to unions. Thursday’s ruling followed three earlier decisions against labor in the last five years, including one that reversed a 40-year-old precedent. And the truckers’ case posed the possibility that the court would overturn another longstanding precedent dating back nearly 70 years. So labor feared the worst: a decision that would hollow out the right to strike. Thursday’s decision, however, was a narrow ruling that generally left strike protections intact.
[…]
The company sued the union in state court, claiming the truck drivers had endangered company equipment. Wet concrete, it explained, hardens easily, and the company had to initiate emergency maneuvers to offload the concrete before it destroyed the trucks.
But the Washington Supreme Court ruled that Glacier’s complaint should have been filed with the National Labor Relations Board. For nearly 70 years, the Supreme Court has said that federal law gives the Board the authority to decide labor disputes as long as the conduct is even arguably protected or prohibited under the federal labor law.
The business community was gunning for, and hoping to eliminate, that rule. But it didn’t get its way. This was a case of winning a relatively minor battle but losing the war. The high court did not overturn or otherwise disturb its longstanding rule giving the NLRB broad authority in labor disputes, leaving unions free to time when they will strike.
At the same time, the court’s majority decided the case in favor of the company in a very fact specific way. The court ultimately said the union’s conduct in this particular case posed a serious and foreseeable risk of harm to Glacier’s trucks, and because of this intentional harm, the case should not have been dismissed by the state supreme court.
Writing for a conservative/liberal majority, Justice Amy Coney Barrett was joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Brett Kavanaugh, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan.
Justices Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, and Clarence Thomas, the court’s three most conservative justices, wrote separately to express frustrations that the court did not go further and reverse a lot of the protections for striker rights. Justice Alito virtually invited Glacier or other business interests to come back and try again.
Writing for the dissent, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson argued the union acted lawfully in timing its strike to put maximum pressure on the employer, pointing out that Glacier could have locked out the workers, or had non-union workers on standby in the event of a strike to prevent any surprise strike timing.
On the facts, Jackson’s dissent is just bizarre. The notion that, by continuing to let union employees continue working under an expired contract while negotiations continued, the company was asking for them to destroy their equipment out of spite is absurd. Of course the union should be liable for the ensuing damages—which the company mitigated considerably by dumping the concrete before it hardened.
I don’t have a firm enough grounding in labor law to have a firm opinion on the deference to the Garmon precedent, other than the fact that 1959 was a long time ago and it should be presumed to be settled law at this point. Further, since neither of the litigants sought to overturn the precedent, it would have been unusual—dare I say, activist—to do so here. Indeed, contra Nina Totenberg’s reporting, I see nothing in either the Thomas or Alito concurrences that even remotely hinted at taking away the right to strike or, indeed, to time strikes for maximum leverage.
