Court Opinion

ID: 9449125
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-03 23:57:44.31139+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:31:42.841398
License: Public Domain

SCHNACKENBERG, Circuit Judge
(dissenting).
While proceedings were pending before the National Labor Relations Board involving National (the employer) and the union representing its employees, the usual Christmas 1960 shutdown for in*288ventory purposes occurred. During that period the six truck drivers involved in this case, although still on National’s payroll, went to Chicago with a supply of handbills, furnished by the union, which financed and sponsored the trip. According to plan, they passed these leaflets ■out to prospective buyers attending the annual furniture exhibit being held in Chicago, where National was displaying its products.
The opinion of this court accepts the trial examiner’s charitable evaluation of a conceded misstatement contained in the leaflets.1 Actually it is conceded that .at the time of the distribution of the handbill, National’s appeal to the full Board from the examiner's decision was awaiting disposition. This fact was not ■even mentioned in the handbill. In view ■of that situation, which the court recognizes, I am at a loss to understand why it feels “constrained to accept the trial examiner’s evaluation of the alleged misstatement,” but at the same time adds that this is “without intending to sanction material departures from minimal standards of truthfulness to which even participants in heated labor controversies must adhere.” It would appear that in this court the same test as to truth and veracity should apply to all cases which come before us. That test has been adopted and applied to proceedings before the National Labor Relations Board in Allis Chalmers Mfg. Co. v. N. L. R. B., 7 Cir., 261 F.2d 613, at 616:
“ * * * If truth is diluted, it is no longer truth. A glass of pure water is no longer pure if a one-ninth part thereof is contaminated, nor is it ‘virtually’ pure. There cannot be ‘virtually’ the truth any more than there can be ‘virtually’ a virgin. * * -* ”
Viewed in its entirety, the record before us clearly presents a picture of a union’s well-organized, premeditated attempt to economically destroy the business of its members’ employer, rather than to wait for and abide by the results to be reached by the established legal machinery provided by the United States for the settlement of differences, which had already assumed jurisdiction of the parties. Admittedly there was no picket line, which is a standard form of protected activity. The men passing out handbills were not on strike. Even if they had been distributed on a picket line, or on a public square two or three blocks from the company’s premises, in barber shops, restaurants and buses, and even though some had been mailed to business men, as in National Labor Relations Board v. Local Union No. 1229, 346 U.S. 464, 468, 74 S.Ct. 172, 98 L.Ed. 195, they were in violation of National’s right to loyalty from its employees. In this case the handbills were distributed in Chicago, which is over a hundred miles from the plant where these men were employed.
The handbills distributed at the Furniture Mart demonstrated such detrimental disloyalty as to provide “cause” for the employer to discontinue in its employ the perpetrators of the attack. See National Labor Relations Board v. Local Union No. 1229, supra, where the court said, 346 U.S. at 472, 74 S.Ct. at 176, 298 L.Ed. 195:
“ * * * There is no more elemental cause for discharge of an employee than disloyalty to his employer. It is equally elemental that the Taft-Hartley Act seeks to strengthen, rather than to weaken, that cooperation, continuity of service and ^cordial contractual relation between employer and employee that is bom of loyalty to their common enterprise.
*289“Congress, while safeguarding, in § 7, the right of employees to engage in ‘concerted activities for the purpose of collective bargaining or other mutual aid or protection,’ did not weaken the underlying contractual bonds and loyalties of employer and employee. * * * ”
The majority opinion naively characterizes the handbill distribution, frankly designed to defeat National’s efforts to secure business, merely as a “type of publicity”. No practical person at the scene would have considered it other than a brutal effort to destroy National’s business. “The fortuity of the coexistence of a labor dispute affords * * * no substantial defense.” National Labor Relations Board v. Local Union No. 1229, supra, 346 U.S. at 476, 74 S.Ct. at 178-179, 98 L.Ed. 195.
In Hoover Co. v. National Labor Relations Board, 6 Cir. (1951), 191 F.2d 380, at 390, the court said:
“ * * * It is a wrong done to the company for employees, while being employed and paid wages by a company, to engage in a boycott to prevent others from purchasing what their employer is engaged in selling and which is the very thing their employer is paying them to produce. An employer is not required, under the Act, to finance a boycott against himself.”
In other language we came to the same conclusion in United Biscuit Co. v. N. L. R. B., 7 Cir. (1942), 128 F.2d 771, 776. This case was recently cited with approval in Atkinson v. Sinclair Refining Co., 370 U.S. 238, 246, 82 S.Ct. 1318, 8 L.Ed. 2d 462 (1962).
Because the majority opinion tolerates and sanctions proscribed disloyalty to an employer, committed contemporaneously with the pendency of a labor dispute before the Board, when it should have abhorred and condemned it, I dissent except as to the result reached in regard to the employee Dillback. Only as to the result reached as to him do I concur.

. The handbill stated, in part:
“The Company’s refusal to deal with the Union, and other unfair labor practices, caused the strike which went on for many months.
“These unfair labor practices by the ■Company were investigated by the National Labor Relations Board. After a lengthy hearing a Trial Examiner of the Labor Board has upheld the Union’s charges.
* * * * *
“The Company has still not fulfilled the remedy which the Trial Examiner recommended. * * * ” (Italics supplied.)