Opinion ID: 741822
Heading Depth: 4
Heading Rank: 5

Heading: Efforts to Settle the Dispute

Text: 32 The Union argues in a footnote near the end of its opening brief that the Hospital introduced insufficient evidence to establish that it engaged in all reasonable efforts to settle the matter before seeking injunctive relief. At the evidentiary hearing, however, the Hospital introduced evidence that it had engaged the Union on a number of occasions in an effort to resolve this dispute before seeking an injunction. There is sufficient evidence in the record to support the district court's conclusion that the Hospital satisfied this element. 33 We emphasize the narrowness of our decision. The Union displayed a banner in front of the Hospital, a secondary entity that was not a party to the labor dispute with Best Interiors, that included a prominent declaratory statement of fact which the Union knew to be false. The Norris-LaGuardia Act generally prohibits federal courts from issuing injunctions in labor disputes, but when a union commits fraud against a neutral secondary entity, the Act grants jurisdiction to federal courts to enjoin the fraudulent activity. The district court in this case carefully crafted a narrow injunction that prohibited the fraudulent manner in which the Union used the term rats, but did not prohibit the use of the term itself. The Hospital presented sufficient evidence to the district court from which it could draw the reasonable conclusion that the strict requirements of the NLA were satisfied. As a result, the district court did not abuse its discretion in issuing a narrowly tailored preliminary injunction to prevent the Union from using the term rats in a fraudulent manner.