Court Opinion

ID: 9443596
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-03 19:25:41.446194+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:29:32.912865
License: Public Domain

HASTIE, Circuit Judge
(dissenting in part).
I think the court is entering too broad a decree. I agree that the respondents, in their organizational activities, should be enjoined from restraining and coercing the employees of Richard H. Gaiser, Ziros Company, Mercury Mining and Construction Corporation and Pine Hill Coal Company in the exercise of rights guaranteed them by Section 7 of the National Labor Relations Act. I do not agree that the order should apply to respondents in their organizational activities wilh “any other employees engaged in mining operations, within the territorial jurisdiction of District 2, United Mine Workers of America”.
District 2 embraces some seventeen Western Pennsylvania counties, outside of the Pittsburgh area, where some 35,000 union miners and an unspecified number of nonunion miners work many mines to produce some 30,000,000 tons of coal annually. The record indicates that the wrongdoing charged in this case is the coercion of some twenty-five coal miners *180employed in four small strip mining and-hauling enterprises.
Neither the Board nor the Trial Ex-' aminer was able to find that these violations were part of any plan for more wide-spread wrongdoing throughout District 2. At most the Board was able to find in all the circumstances “a real danger” that similar unlawful conduct might be repeated elsewhere in the District. Such risk is now held to justify a decree applicable to all mines and miners in the area.
My objection is that the order of this court will enable as many of the thousands of employees and employers in Western Pennsylvania as may in the future have disputes with the United Mine Workers concerning alleged compulsion in the matter of union membership to bring these new and independent controversies here in first instance for adjudication under contempt citations. To me this seems to be inviting the wrong procedure before the wrong-tribunal. And I cannot see how the fact that the Board now anticipates future trouble justifies an advance arrangement to handle it in the wrong way. Of course this means less work for the Board. But it brings inappropriate business to us. Judge Stephens, dissenting in a somewhat similar case, N.L.R.B. v. Sun Tent-Luebbert Co., 9 Cir., 1945, 151 F.2d 483, 490, was right when he said that the National Labor Relations Act does not contemplate “summary trial of facts by the Circuit Court of Appeals by way of contempt proceedings in cases which never have been and never will be before the National Labor Relations Board.”
Even where the actual misconduct is shown to be part of a plan for more widespread violation of the labor laws, regard for suitable procedure in a proper forum should, in my view, lead a Court of Appeals to do no more than enjoin acts in furtherance of the established plan. And in the absence of plan, I can see no reason whatever for permitting new labor disputes to be brought here as alleged contempts.
' Moreover, to me it hardly seems fair that the union, not shown to have planned a district-wide campaign of coercion, should have the constant threat of civil and criminal contempt impending over its legitimate efforts to unionize mines throughout a large producing area. The exigencies of proof and of interpretation of conduct are such that this risk is a substantial one even for a defendant who is trying to abide by the court’s decree.
The Courts of Appeals have been mindful of these considerations in cases where the Board, on the basis of unfair labor practices in one or more plants of an employer who operates other plants as well, has sought judicial enforcement of orders which would extend beyond the places of wrong and embrace similar misconduct in the employer’s other plants. In such cases the courts have modified the Board’s orders and have enforced them only as to the plants where unfair labor practices have actually occurred. See Reliance Manufacturing Company v. N.L.R.B., 7 Cir., 1942, 125 F.2d 311; N.L.R.B. v. Ford Motor Co., 5 Cir., 1941, 119 F.2d 326; Shell Oil Co. v. N.L.R.B., 5 Cir., 1952, 196 F.2d 637.
To me it seems that the reach of the order in the present case beyond the persons and places involved in the labor dispute before the Board is even harder to justify. I would modify the Board’s order and restrict its enforcement to organizational activities in connection with the mining and hauling enterprises involved in this case.