Court Opinion

ID: 9643373
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-22 20:27:22.972486+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:11:00.125397
License: Public Domain

JOPINSEN, Circuit Judge
(concurring).
I merely wish to add an observation or two on the Board’s finding that the Chamber of Commerce had acted in the interest of the Button Company and had thus put itself in the position o'f “employer” under section 2(2) of the National Labor Relations Act,1 29 U.S.C.A. § 152(2), and that it therefore should be held to have interfered with,, restrained, and coerced the Company’s employees in their right of self-organization.
The Board said that “the Chamber of Commerce engaged in a parallel campaign to dissuade employees of the Company from voting for the Union” [emphasis mine]; that “the activities of the Chamber of Commerce were motivated by it's opposition to the Union”; and that “the actions of [those members of the Chamber who had suggested to employees of the Button Company that it was to the best interest of the community to keep the Union out] were taken upon direction by, and are attributable to, the Chamber of Commerce.”
The Board, however, did not purport to find that the activities of the Chamber of Commerce were instigated by the Company; or that the Chamber had made any agreement or alliance with the Company to become part of its subject forces; or that the Chamber had any relationship to or interest in the Company, other than as a community institution — such as might by legal attribution or imputation have made it the mere mouthpiece of the Company; or that the Chamber had assumed to make reprisive threats, such as, for example, that its members might refuse to hire any of the employees in their various businesses, if the Union election carried and the Company closed its plant; or that the advertisement of the Chamber and the expressions of it's members did not represent statements of actual fact or of honest belief.
That the Chamber of Commerce was opposed to unionism, that it had some of its members suggest' to employees of the Button Company that the interest of the community would be best served by voting against the Union in the plant' election, and that it published an advertisement declaring that it was interested in the button plant as a community institution and had investigated its wage scale in comparison with other button plants and that the statements being made that the wages of the local plant were below the average in the industry were untrue, might warrant the Board in finding that the Chamber was acting in the interest of the employer, within the meaning of section 2(2) of the Act, but it would not follow from this, without more, that the Board was entitled to hold that the Chamber was guilty of illegal interference, restraint and coercion in the employees’ right of self-organization.
I do not have any doubt that expressions of hostility to union organization made by an employer to his employees, for the purpose of influencing their vote in a plant election, may, in the economic hold of a particular employment field or of some immediate plant situation, amount to an improper interference with, and restraint and coercion of, the right of self-organization. But I have no less certainty of conviction that such expressions made by a third party, who is not shown by the evidence to have any legal identity with the employer, or to possess a separate coercive hold upon the employees, or, where such a hold exists, to have attempted to exercise it, as by threats, express or implied, of capable reprisal, cannot broadly or loosely be. branded as illegal interference, restraint, or coercion.
The pendency of a local labor dispute cannot be made to impose a legal gag upon the community. Nor can the members of the community be prevented from making expressions upon the issue because they choose to take sides. It is when speech has a purpose that the right is the most valuable and its protection the most important. Probably only because men have been interested in the questions that surround them, and because they have been free to air their inner stirrings upon the issues which such questions present, and because they have believed that it was important that their voice be made heard, has American life survived.
*320Unions, Chambers of Commerce, and ■every other group, all have the right' to •criticize, with fair expression, the position •of each other, both generally and in some particular situation. I should suspect that the expression of one economic group probably is without much effect upon the members of another, where there is no hold of immediate relationship between them, and I should doubt that the Chamber of Commerce’s advertisement and the anti-union expressions of its members could have had much, if any, influence on the Button Company’s employees in the present situation. But, whether it did or not, the mere fact that it might have tended to influence the employees would not of itself make it illegal interference, restraint, or coercion. It would not in my judgment constitute illegal interference, restraint, or coercion, unless the influence was such as to impinge, through physical, moral or economic fears, upon the employees’ ability to make a free choice. On the record before us, there is no basis for holding that the Chamber of Commerce had any such hold or that any of these fears did or could arise from what it said and did.
Encroachment upon the right - of free expression of the members of one group is a potential threat of encroachment upon the right of the members of another. Labor least of all can afford the risk of any such potential threat, no matter how slight or remote it may seem.

 § 2(2). “The term ‘employer’ includes any person acting in the interest of an employer, directly or indirectly * * *