Court Opinion

ID: 9595268
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-22 00:37:54.698322+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T11:40:28.121989
License: Public Domain

LARSON, Justice
(dissenting).
I dissent because I believe this PLA violates both the letter and the spirit of our right-to-work law, Iowa Code section 731.1:
It is declared to be the policy of the state of Iowa that no person within its boundaries shall be deprived of the right to work at the person’s chosen occupation for any employer because of membership in, affiliation with, withdrawal or expulsion from, or refusal to join, any labor union, organization, or association, and any contract which contravenes this policy is illegal and void.
(Emphasis added.)
The Board argues for a narrow interpretation of the statute, one that the majority appears to adopt:
The right-to-work statutes prohibit a narrow range of conduct, essentially confined to the refusal to hire an applicant or the termination of an existing employee because of his status as a member or nonmember of a labor organization.
This statute is not as limited in its protection of free choice as the Board suggests. The statute protects the right to work — not just the right to enter into or keep a contract of employment based on union or nonunion status. In other words, in a worker’s relationship with an employer, it should make no difference if the worker is union or nonunion. The majority suggests this is no problem here and there will be no discrimination against nonunion workers. I believe this is unrealistic for the reasons I will discuss later.
*400Under the PLA, all hiring must be done through union hiring halls and in accordance with a crew ratio provision in the PLA. Under the PLA, an employer will be limited on the number of his own employees (referred to as core employees) who may be used on a project. All remaining workers must be taken from the union hall with no initial choice on the part of the employer.
A small employer with fourteen or fewer core employees may use 50% of its regular employees. With larger employers, however, the percentage of core employees is reduced proportionately to the size of the contractor’s workforce. A contractor who has 100 core employees and needs all of them may use only fourteen of them. The balance is to be provided through the union hiring hall. The balance of the employer’s core employees, if the employees want to work on their own employer’s project, will have to go through the union hall. They, together with all other available workers, including nonemployees of the company, union and nonunion, seek to go to work for an employer with whom they already had a job. The Board contends this is no problem because the agreement requires the union hall to refer workers on a nondiscriminatory basis— nonunion as well as union. I believe it is naive to think this is a meaningful protection for nonunion workers because union officials determine which workers in the hiring pool are “qualified” to do' the job.
The majority discounts this reality by pointing to a provision in the PLA that prohibits the hiring hall from discriminating against nonunion workers. However, it will be easy for union personnel to prefer their own members over nonunion workers on the subjective ground they are more qualified.
The majority contends that the Supreme Court case of Local 357, International Brotherhood of Teamsters supports the Board’s argument that an antidiscrimi-nation agreement in the PLA will legitimize this arrangement. I believe that case is inapposite because it did not provide for selection of employees on the same basis as the present case. In fact, the PLA in Local 357, International Brotherhood of Teamsters provided that the assignment out of the union hiring hall would be done on the basis of seniority' — an objective standard as compared to the determination of “qualification,” as provided in the PLA in this case. See Local 357, Int’l Bhd. of Teamsters, 365 U.S. at 669, 81 S.Ct. at 836, 6 L.Ed.2d at 14.
The effect of this PLA is to create an uneven playing field for certain employers and their workers, based on their nonunion status. It therefore violates the words and the spirit of our right-to-work law, and the case should be reversed on that ground.