Court Opinion

ID: 9639467
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-22 16:19:11.599495+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:10:18.900168
License: Public Domain

CLARK, Circuit Judge
(dissenting).
In my humble judgment the National Labor Relations Board has here been guilty of a second disservice to wise industrial relations. I say second because the United States Supreme Court has already expressed its disagreement with their earlier approval of the so-called “sit-down strike”.1 I cannot, therefore, join my learned brethren in assenting to what I deem to he an*512other mistake. The Fansteel case declared a limitation on the National Labor Relations Act. The theory of that limitation has been much discussed. As is often the case in matters of statutory interpretation, there has not been unanimity either as to its basis or its scope.2 It is clear, however, that the inferior federal courts have been directed to except from the reinstatement requirements of the act certain types of misbehaving employees. In the Republic case this court had occasion to attempt some classification of those types.3 The attempt was successful insofar as success is implied in denial of certiorari.4
In the case at bar we are required to pass upon employee conduct in a special environment. That environment is the sea and the conduct is that of those who go down thereto in ships. The behavior oí the seamen ordered reinstated by the Board consisted of a collective cessation from work on a ship moored to a dock in a foreign5 port. On land such a cessation from work comes within the right to strike. That right has happily been an accepted part of our jurisprudence for many years.6 That does not and plainly cannot mean the right is absolute.7 Mr. Justice Brandéis pointed that out some years ago saying: “The right to carry on business — be it called liberty or property — has value. To interfere with this right without just cause is unlawful. The fact that the injury was inflicted by a strike is sometimes a justification. But a strike may be illegal because of its purpose, however orderly the manner in which it is conducted. * * * Neither the common law, nor the Fourteenth Amendment, confers the absolute right to strike. Compare Aikens v. Wisconsin, 195 U.S. 194, 204, 205, 25 S.Ct. 3, 49 L.Ed. 154.” Dorchy v. Kansas, 272 U.S. 306, 311, 47 S.Ct. 86, 87, 71 L.Ed. 248.
Our purpose here does not require .any catalogue of exceptions. Courts and individual judges are not always in accord.8 They search for an adjustment of the conflicting interests of both parties to the economic conflict in relation to their background as members of a community. By the same token, the test is not one of convenience. The weapon of the strike depends upon inconvenience to the employer *513and sometimes even to^ innocent third parties lor its efficacy.9 Its sanction in that aspect is one of the penalties of the warfare conception of labor relations. So the timing can he selected in terms of strategy rather than in terms of effective production.
One limitation of time has been recognized both by the cases and by statute.10 That time is the time of another war, the war between nations rather than strife over what is a just proportionate share of the profits of production. It is dangerous for a country engaged in its own defense to accord to workers the right to impose upon its need to avoid the fatal “too late and too little”. So it is dangerous for a community to accede to a timing which goes beyond inconvenience into peril. This is the philosophy expressed by that great Massachusetts lawyer and defender of the oppressed, Moorfield Storey, in his well-known article, The Right to Strike, above cited. Mr. Storey says: “ * * * Therefore the right of the individual to leave his work must be subject to the paramount right of the public. The engineer who is running a train from one great centre to another can no more stop in the middle of his journey in some desolate place and tell his passengers he will not go on unless they pay him a considerable sum of money than a sailor aboard ship can mutiny to obtain some advantage to himself at the expense of the voyage. The principle admits no distinction. The people through their legislatures can and should insist that labor disputes shall be decided by judicial tribunals and not by civil war, and that we shall not all live subject to the danger of such war whenever labor leaders choose to bring it on.” Storey, The Right to Strike, 32 Yale Law Journal 99, 105. (Italics mine.)
It is the philosophy also of the Wicks Hill 11 forbidding the abandonment of public conveyances, passed recently by the New York Legislature. Upon his approval thereof, another great counselor of the downtrodden, Governor Lehman of New York, stated that “no one with any common sense would interpret this Act as a denial of the right to strike”. As a matter of fact 1 had always thought that was the philosophy of the labor movement itself. Certainly one remembers the return of engines to the roundhouse and the careful manning of pumps in the mines.
Should that philosophy be adjudged part of the National Labor Relations Act and so those who disregard it be excepted from the act’s benefits? I think it should. And to so decide does not, in my belief, require me to differ with my brethren as to the present incidence of the crime of mutiny. Undoubtedly their view that Captain Bligh has been dead a long time finds current acceptance. I am pleased to note they cite some of the legal periodicals which are this writer’s favorite pabulum. Let me add four more to their two.12 I do not think the test is mutiny vel non. Such a holding leans too heavily on the felony-misdemean- or distinction of the land cases.13
It is true that only inconvenience and not danger may result from a particular cessation at the dock in a foreign port. To bottom a general whitewash upon that fact overlooks, in my opinion, the very essence of maritime traffic. Such essence, here, as in the air, is the “happy landing”, the safe return of the vessel from its voyage. It may be that during the course of its journey a ship is in positions where its security is unaffected by the idleness of its crew. Some qualms are detectable by the narrowness of the majority’s ruling.14 The difficulty seems to me more fundamental. The Board and this court entrust the estimation of that security to the persons most likely to be biased. Shipwrecked passengers will take little satisfaction in the sailors’ equivalent of the common and tragic, “didn’t know it was loaded”. Labor unions have been solicitous in their *514advocacy of full crew laws. Maritime unions argue for the extension of maintenance and care of seamen beyond the voyage. Is it not inconsistent to break the care of passengers during the voyage and to suggest no crews at all ? One of the authors above cited puts this argument in slightly different fashion. He says: “To advocate strikes on board a ship at its pier merely on the basis that, in such circumstances, the safety of lives and cargo is not endangered, is to take a short-sighted point of view. No doubt, while a vessel is in port, the immediate security of all concerned is not greatly jeopardized by the crew’s refusal to do its duty. But it is not alone the immediate safety or the present security which must be considered. There is an ultimate safety which must be protected. For this there must be discipline at all times, whether the ship be at sea or tied to shore in the safest of harbors. .A master who cannot control his crew in port is not likely to be able to control it at sea. To allow the seamen to resist lawful commands in one place is but to encourage similar resistance elsewhere.” Sit-down Strikes on Shipboard, 23 Cornell Law Quarterly 302, 306, 307 (note).
To stop work on land just after a large order is received or to refuse to sail a ship which is away from her home port undoubtedly gives additional economic leverage. Inconvenience to consumers is one thing, danger to passengers is quite another. If the National Labor Relations Act may be used, as the Supreme Court has held, to deter employee misbehavior, the writer of this dissent can think of no better example or more useful occasion.

 N. L. R. B. v. Fansteel Metallurgical *512Corp., 306 U.S. 240, 59 S.Ct. 490, 83 L.Ed. 627, 123 A.L.R. 599.

 Labor Law — Legal Status of Sit-down Strike — Legal and Equitable Remedies, 35 Michigan Law Review 1330 (comment) ; The Fansteel Decision: Protection of Striking Workers Under the Wagner Act, 33 Illinois Law Review 187 (comment); Labor Law — National Labor Relations Board — Effect of Employees’ Misconduct on Right to Reinstatement, 38 Columbia Law Review 1507, 1508 (note); Hart and Pritchard, The Fan-steel Case: Employee Misconduct and the Remedial Powers of the National Labor Relations Board, 52 Harvard Law Review 1275; Labor Law — National Labor Relations Act — Employee Misconduct as Barring Relief, 37 Michigan Law Review, 1253 (comment); Employee Misconduct Under the Wagner Act: Developments Since the Fansteel Case, 39 Columbia Law Review 1369 (note); cf. Weisiger, Reinstatement of Sit-down Strikers, 23 Minnesota Law Review 30.

 Republic Steel Corp. v. N. L. R. B., 3 Cir., 107 F.2d 472.

 Republic Steel Corp. v. N. L. R. B., 309 U.S. 684, 60 S.Ct. 806, 84 L.Ed. 1027.

 As contrasted with home — the port being Houston, Texas.

 Wright, Criminal Conspiracies and Agreements, § 12, p. 35; Martin, The Modern Law of Labor Unions, § 30 General Bight of Workmen to Strike; Oakes, Organized Labor and Industrial Conflicts, § 312 The Right to Strike — In General ; Storey, The Right to Strike, 32 Yale Law Journal 99; Mason, The Right to Strike, 77 University of Pennsylvania Law Review 52; Labor Union — Right to Strike — Unlawful Interference, 9 Boston University Law Review 280 (comment); Nelles, The First American Labor Case, 41 Yale Law Journal 165.

 What right is ?, one might reflect. In discussing that very precious right, that of free expression, I quoted Mr. Lippman: “There are, so far as I can discover no absolutists of liberty; I can recall no doctrine of liberty which under the acid test does not become contingent upon some other ideal. * * * For what every theorist of liberty has meant is that certain types of behaviour and classes of opinion better regulated should be somewhat differently regulated in the future.” 124 Atlantic Monthly 616, quoted in Committee for Industrial Organization v. Hague, D.C., 25 F.Supp. 127, 131.

 Oakes, Organized Labor and Industrial Conflicts, § 313 Where Striking Involves Breach of Contract, § 314 Other Limitations on Right to Strike; Lowry, Strikes and the Law, 21 Columbia Law Review 783; Sayre, Labor and the Courts, 39 Yale Law Journal 682; Eskin, The Legality of “Peaceful Coercion” in Labor Disputes, 85 University of Pennsylvania Law Review 456.

 Frankfurter and Greene, The Labor Injunction, Chapter I, The Allowable Area of Economic Conflict.

 Right to Strike in War Time, 32 Harvard Law Review 837 (note); Injunction: Coal Strike Enjoined as Violation of the Level' Act, 5 Cornell Law Quarterly 184 (note) ; cf. Chafee, The Progress of the Law, 1913-1920, 34 Harvard Law Review 388, 400 et seq.

 P.L. (N.Y.) 1939, c. 927.

 Sit-down Strike on Shipboard, 23 Cornell Law Quarterly 302, 305, 303 (note); Seamen — Mutiny — Sit-down Strikes, 18 Oregon Law Review 128, 134 (note); S.S.Algic, 1 National Lawyers Guild Quarterly 144, 148; Labor Law— Right of Seamen to Strike, 87 Columbia Law Review 1294 (note).

 Employee Misconduct Under the Wagner Act: Developments Since the Fansteel Case, 39 Columbia Law Review 1309 (note).

 Would it be the same, for instance, if one instead of two hawsers were used?