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Matched Legal Cases: ['§ 8', '§ 8', '§ 8', '§ 8', '§ 8', '§ 8', '§ 8', '§ 8', '§ 8', '§ 8', '§ 8', '§ 8', '§ 8', '§ 8', '§ 8', '§ 8', '§ 8', '§ 8', '§ 8']

NLRB V. INT'L LONGSHOREMEN'S ASSN., 473 U. S. 61 - Volume 473 - 1985 - Full Text - US Supreme Court Center - USSC Cases - Nolo
US Supreme Court Center > Volume 473 > NLRB V. INT'L LONGSHOREMEN'S ASSN., 473 U. S. 61 (1985) > Full Text
(a) National Woodwork, supra, concluded that §§ 8(b)(4)(B) and 8(e) were intended by Congress to "reach only secondary pressures," and that agreements negotiated with the objective of preserving work in the face of a threat to union members' jobs are lawful primary activity. These conclusions were reaffirmed in NLRB v. Pipefitters, 429 U. S. 507, and ILA I, supra. Pp. 473 U. S. 74-78.
BRENNAN, J., delivered the opinion of the Court, in which WHITE, MARSHALL, BLACKMUN, POWELL, and STEVENS, JJ., joined. REHNQUIST, J., filed a dissenting opinion, in which BURGER, C.J., and O'CONNOR, J., joined, post, p. 473 U. S. 84.
447 U.S. at 447 U. S. 495. As we explained in some detail in ILA I, the advent of containerization some 25 years ago profoundly transformed this traditional pattern, by reducing the cost of ocean cargo transport and "largely eliminat[ing] the need for cargo handling at intermediate stages." Id. at 447 U. S. 509. [Footnote 1]
The Rules do not require that all containers be loaded or unloaded by longshoremen at the pier. Instead, they apply only to containers that would otherwise be loaded or unloaded within the local port area, defined for convenience as
Although the marine shipping companies and longshoremen have accepted the various compromises that the Rules represent, three groups of non-ILA employers are unhappy
All these facts were before the Court in ILA I. We did not find that any of them required invalidation of the Rules. Instead, because we found that the Board had erred as a matter of law in defining the "work" in controversy, we remanded to the Board for further proceedings. 447 U.S. at
473 U. S. 512-513. Nine cases involving charges of unfair labor practices filed by consolidators, truckers, or warehousers against the ILA were then consolidated by the Board and sent to an Administrative Law Judge (ALJ) for factfinding and disposition. [Footnote 6] The charging parties claimed generally that the Rules constitute an unlawful agreement in violation of § 8(e), [Footnote 7] and that enforcement of the Rules, which has resulted in marine transport companies not dealing with certain off-pier
266 N.L.R.B. at 247. He rejected the argument that containerization has so changed the character of the cargo transportation industry that this work has simply disappeared. [Footnote 9] Noting that the Rules are
First, the Board provided a definition of "the work in dispute," because the ALJ had not done so explicitly. Id. at 236. Second, the Board rejected the ALJ's "findings that an illegal work acquisition objective is revealed in the Rules,"
The Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit affirmed the Board's general validation of the Rules, concluding that the Board's crucial dual findings -- that the shipping companies have the "right to control" container work and that the Rules had a bona fide work preservation objective -- were supported by substantial evidence. American Trucking Assns., Inc. v. NLRB, 734 F.2d 966, 977-978 (1984). For
We have labored in the past to determine Congress' will as expressed in §§ 8(b)(4)(B) and 8(e) -- this case requires no new development. In light of the Board's factual findings,
In National Woodwork, after reviewing in detail the relevant legislative and judicial history, we concluded that "Congress meant that both § 8(e) and § 8(b)(4)(B) reach only secondary pressures." 386 U.S. at 386 U. S. 638; accord, Houston Contractors Assn. v. NLRB, 386 U. S. 664, 386 U. S. 668 (1967). [Footnote 13] In this regard, the prohibitory scope of § 8(e) was found to be no broader than that of § 8(b)(4)(B). 386 U.S. at 386 U. S. 635, 386 U. S. 638. The purpose of § 8(e) had been to close a "loophole" in the labor laws that allowed unions to employ "hot cargo" agreements
Id. at 386 U. S. 644-645. We expressly noted that a different case might be presented if a union engaged in activity "to reach out to monopolize jobs
We reaffirmed the National Woodwork analysis in ILA I, and noted that "a lawful work preservation agreement must pass two tests:" the objective of the agreement must be preservation of work for members of the union, rather than some secondary goal, and the "right of control" test of NLRB v. Pipefitters, 429 U. S. 507 (1977), must be satisfied. 447 U.S. at 447 U. S. 504. [Footnote 16] We ruled, however, that the Board had
ILA I concluded, however, that collective bargaining agreements designed to "accommodate change" while still preserving some type of work for union members may nevertheless be lawful primary agreements; the work preservation doctrine does not require that unions block progress by refusing to permit any use at all of new technology in order to avoid the prohibitions of §§ 8(b)(4)(B) and 8(e). Id. at 447 U. S. 506. The inquiry is whether "the objective of the agreement was work preservation, rather than the satisfaction of union goals elsewhere," id. at 447 U. S. 510, and the analytical focus must be "on the work of the bargaining unit employees, not on the work of
We accept the Board's factual findings as supported by substantial evidence, Universal Camera Corp. v. NLRB, 340 U. S. 474 (1951), and are mindful of the rule that the Board's construction of the Act is due our deference. See, e.g., Beth Israel Hospital v. NLRB, 437 U. S. 483, 437 U. S. 500-501 (1978); NLRB v. Erie Resistor Corp., 373 U. S. 221, 373 U. S. 236 (1963). We are in agreement with the Board's basic statutory conclusions: §§ 8(b)(4)(B) and 8(e) prohibit secondary, but not
In our view, the Board committed two fundamental errors. First, by focusing on the effect that the Rules may have on "shortstopping" truckers and "traditional" warehousers, the Board contravened our direction that such extra-unit effects, "no matter how severe," are "irrelevant" to the analysis. 447 U.S. at 447 U. S. 507, n. 22. "So long as the union had no forbidden secondary purpose" to disrupt the business relations of a neutral employer, ibid., such effects are "incidental to primary activity." Pipefitters, 429 U.S. at 429 U. S. 526. Here the ALJ, Board, and Court of Appeals all have agreed that the Rules were motivated entirely by the longshoremen's understandable desire to preserve jobs against "the steadily dwindling volume" of cargo work at the pier. 734 F.2d at 978. Given this clear primary objective to preserve work in the face of a threat to jobs, extra-unit effects of a work preservation agreement alone provide an insufficient basis for concluding that the agreement has an unlawful secondary objective. Absent some additional showing of an attempt "to reach out to monopolize jobs," National Woodwork, supra, at 386 U. S. 630, that is, proof of an attempt "not to preserve, but to aggrandize," Pipefitters, supra, at 429 U. S. 528-530, n. 16, such an agreement is lawful. [Footnote 19]
Second, we believe the Board misconstrued our cases in suggesting that "eliminated" work can never be the object of a work preservation agreement. Technological innovation will often, by design, eliminate some aspect of an industry's work. For example, in National Woodwork, the agreement at issue strove to preserve carpentry work done by hand at the job site, even though new off-site machining techniques had eliminated the necessity for much of this work. Yet the jobs of carpenters were no less threatened, nor was their attempt to preserve them any less primary, than if the contractor had decided to subcontract the cutting and fitting of doors to nonunion workers. Cf. Fibreboard Corp. v. NLRB, 379 U. S. 203, 379 U. S. 209 (1964). Similarly, containers have eliminated some of the work of loading and unloading cargo by hand for all participants in the industry -- longshoremen, truckers, and warehousers alike. [Footnote 20] "Elimination" of work
It must not be forgotten that the relevant inquiry under §§ 8(b)(4)(B) and 8(e) is whether a union's activity is primary or secondary -- that is, whether the union's efforts are directed at its own employer on a topic affecting employees' wages, hours, or working conditions that the employer can control, or, instead, are directed at affecting the business relations of neutral employers and are "tactically calculated" to achieve union objectives outside the primary employer-employee relationship. See National Woodwork, 386 U.S. at 386 U. S. 644-645; Pipefitters, 429 U.S. at 429 U. S. 528-529, and n. 16. The various linguistic formulae and evidentiary mechanisms we have employed to describe the primary/secondary distinction are not talismanic, nor can they substitute for analysis. See generally Railroad Trainmen v. Jacksonville Terminal Co., 394 U. S. 369, 394 U. S. 386-390 (1969). The inquiry is often an inferential and fact-based one, at times requiring the drawing of lines "more nice than obvious." Electrical Workers v. NLRB, 366 U. S. 667, 366 U. S. 674 (1961); see Pipefitters, supra, at 429 U. S. 531 ("common sense inference"). In this case, however, the ALJ, Board, and Court of Appeals all found that the ILA negotiated the Rules on Containers with the sole object of preserving work for its members, and that there is no evidence of "any significant ILA interest in the labor relations of the class of employers boycotted by the Rules." 266 N.L.R.B. at 249. Furthermore, as the Fourth Circuit noted, this is not a case in which an avowed work preservation agreement "seeks to claim work so different from that traditionally performed by the bargaining unit employees" that a secondary objective might be inferred. 734 F.2d at 980. [Footnote 21] When the objective of an agreement and its enforcement
In ILA I, it was argued that the Rules preserve work made "utterly useless" by containerization and thus are "nothing less than an invidious form of featherbedding' to block full implementation of modern technological progress." Id. at 447 U. S. 526-527 (BURGER, C.J., dissenting). Similar arguments are repeated today, see post at 473 U. S. 89, 473 U. S. 90, and were presented in National Woodwork as well. See 386 U.S. at 386 U. S. 644. Our response is no different than it was 18 years ago: "Those arguments are addressed to the wrong branch of government." Ibid. [Footnote 22] Justice Harlan wrote separately in National Woodwork to underscore the Court's reasoning on this point:
It is not surprising that neither the opinion of the Court today nor the body of the opinion in NLRB v. Longshoremen, 447 U. S. 490 (1980) (ILA I), contains the text of the
The effect of these Rules is well illustrated by their application to the trucking practice known as "shortstopping" -- one of the classes of work with respect to which the Board found the Rules to be work acquisitive. Prior to containerization,
It should be evident that the Rules violate the plain language of § 8(e). The Rules constitute an "agreement" between an employer and a labor organization "whereby [the] employer . . . agrees . . . to cease doing business with any other person. . . ." That is the import of Rule 7(d). Nor can it be doubted on the facts here that the union has transgressed the plain language of § 8(b)(4)(B) by seeking to enforce the agreement through coercing the shipowners to stop providing containers to certain entities that were violating the Rules. As a matter of plain language, one would not think that the union's actions here fell within the statutory exception for "primary strikes or primary picketing." Finally, I think it fairly obvious why Congress would seek to prohibit such activity by labor unions. As illustrated by this very case, absent such restrictions, unions are free to exercise their considerable power, through concerted action, to manipulate the allocation of resources in our economy -- even to the point where, in the name of "work preservation," a union could literally halt technological advance.
One might well ask, then, how §§ 8(e) and 8(b)(4)(B) have been construed so as not to preclude the actions at issue here. It has not been a simple process. Beginning with National Woodwork Manufacturers Assn. v. NLRB, 386 U. S. 612 (1967), this Court explained its understanding that the exception in § 8(b)(4)(B) for "primary strikes or primary picketing" indicated that Congress only intended to preclude "secondary activity" under that section. Then, relying only on the ambiguous legislative history of § 8(e), the Court concluded that that section also was intended to preclude only "secondary" activity. Admittedly, at least with respect to § 8(b)(4)(B), this distinction has some support in the language of the statute, and even has some usefulness despite the fact that, as the Court recognizes, ante at 473 U. S. 81, the primary/secondary distinction is perhaps one of the gauziest of legal concepts. But assuming that Congress did not intend § 8(e) to extend to certain kinds of agreements that could be described as "primary," it does not follow from that concession that "work preservation" is one of the "primary" activities that the statutes do not prohibit. Yet that is the conclusion that the Court reached in National Woodwork, and the work preservation/work acquisition distinction provides the basis for the conclusion the Court reaches today. As refined by the Court, it now appears that, at least where a particular union's jobs are "threatened," an agreement will be considered valid so long as the union's subjective intent is to preserve union jobs and the union conducts its bargaining with an employer who has "control" over those jobs; it is only where the agreement is "tactically calculated to satisfy union objectives elsewhere," ante at 473 U. S. 78, that the agreement will be considered work-acquisitive. In applying this test, we are told first that we must look to "all the surrounding circumstances,'" ante at 473 U. S. 75 (quoting National Woodwork), to determine whether the union's objective was work preservation, or the acquisition
As to the relationship between the Court's test and Congress' intent, I note that today the Court forthrightly admits that a "work preservation" agreement will not be illegal despite the fact that its intent is to preserve work that has been entirely "eliminated" by technological change. As noted previously, such agreements can result in "preserving" work merely by requiring duplication, thereby forcing an employer to pay for labor that no longer has an economic use. Indeed, one of the reasons stated by the Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit for upholding the Rules as applied to "shortstopping" was that, given that, under the Rules, ILA labor would have to unload at the pier any container that was going to be shortstopped, there still was no indication in the record that the ILA had "acquired" any work, because there was no indication that the containers would not be shortstopped in any event when they reached the trucking terminal. American Trucking Assns., Inc. v. NLRB, 734 F.2d 966, 979 (1984). As THE CHIEF JUSTICE noted in his dissent in ILAI,
the upshot of allowing unions to enter into such agreements is that they may render change so difficult, by artificially raising the costs of a new system, that they stifle technological advance. ILA I, 447 U.S. at 447 U. S. 526-527 (BURGER, C.J., dissenting). It is hard to believe that the Congress which enacted a statute that, by its plain terms, would have prohibited such agreements nevertheless intended to sanction agreements requiring such make-work.
A decent regard for stare decisis suggests that battle be not again joined on the question decided in National Woodwork, but, to me, the dubious correctness of that decision indicates that the Court should not expand it beyond its facts, and should now try to move in the direction of the plain language of the statutes in those cases not clearly covered by National Woodwork. I can agree that § 8(e) cannot be read
There is no dispute that "shortstopping" occurred even when longshoremen regularly unloaded cargo breakbulk from the ships and the cargo was placed into trucks. Similarly,
The conclusion that the Rules are secondary -- and work-acquisitive -- in the case before us is supported by a look at how the Rules actually are structured with respect to "shortstopping"
The Court avoids this conclusion by stating the test as whether the union's objective was to preserve its traditional work, and by pretending to accept the ALJ's and the Board's "findings" that "the ILA's objective consistently has been to preserve longshore work. . . ." Ante at 473 U. S. 81-82. I, of course, agree with the Court that the Board's factual findings must be accepted if supported by substantial evidence, and that deference is due to the Board's construction of the Act, ante at 473 U. S. 78, but the Board did not make the findings the Court cites. The Board accepted the ALJ's finding that the "ILA had an overall work preservation objective in negotiating the Rules," see 266 N.L.R.B. 230, 236 (1983), but
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