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Page Number: 11

8 

GLACIER NORTHWEST, INC. v. TEAMSTERS 

Opinion of the Court 

initiated the strike before Glacier’s trucks were full of wet 
concrete—say, by instructing drivers to refuse to load their
trucks  in  the  first  place.    Once  the  strike  was  underway,
nine  of  the  Union’s  drivers  abandoned  their  fully  loaded
trucks without telling anyone—which left the trucks on a
path to destruction unless Glacier saw them in time to un-
load  the  concrete.  Yet  the  Union did  not  take  the  simple 
step  of  alerting  Glacier  that  these  trucks  had  been  re-
turned.  Nor, after the trucks were in the yard, did the Un-
ion direct its drivers to follow Glacier’s instructions to facil-
itate  a  safe  transfer  of  equipment.  To  be  clear,  the 
“reasonable precautions” test does not mandate any one ac-
tion in particular.  But the Union’s failure to take even min-
imal precautions illustrates its failure to fulfill its duty. 

Indeed,  far  from  taking  reasonable  precautions  to  miti-
gate foreseeable danger to Glacier’s property, the Union ex-
ecuted the strike in a manner designed to compromise the 
safety  of  Glacier’s  trucks  and  destroy  its  concrete.    Such 
conduct  is  not  “arguably  protected”  by  the  NLRA;  on  the 
contrary, it goes well beyond the NLRA’s protections.  See 
NLRB v. Marshall Car Wheel & Foundry Co., 218 F. 2d 409, 
411,  413  (CA5  1955)  (strike  unprotected  when  employees
abandoned their posts without warning “when molten iron 
in the plant cupola was ready to be poured off,” even though 
“a  lack  of  sufficient  help  to  carry  out  the  critical  pouring
operation might well have resulted in substantial property 
damage”).

Thus,  accepting  the  complaint’s  allegations  as  true,  the
Union did not take reasonable precautions to protect Glac-
ier’s  property  from  imminent  danger  resulting  from  the
drivers’  sudden  cessation  of  work.    The  state  court  thus 
erred  in  dismissing  Glacier’s  tort  claims  as  preempted  on 
the pleadings. 

III 
The  Union  resists  this  conclusion.    First,  it  emphasizes