Court Opinion

ID: 9443879
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-03 19:33:05.868751+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:18:04.223539
License: Public Domain

HASTIE, Circuit Judge
(dissenting).
The behavior of employee Williams, as revealed in this record, is as unappealing to me as it is to my colleagues. But under the pertinent provision of the Labor-Management Relations Act, I cannot see that the board acted improperly in ordering his reinstatement.
The court concedes the propriety of the board’s finding that the employer discharged Williams at the union’s behest be*612cause of his non-membership in the union, even though the employer knew that Wil- ’ liams had been deprived of his union membership for reasons- other than non-payment of dues. But in Section 8(a) (3) (B) of the National Labor Relations Act as amended by the Labor-Management Relations Act, 1947, Congress has expressed a policy decision that in a union shop sitúation no cause of dismissal from the union other than non-payment of dues shall justify the union in calling for the employee’s discharge under its union security contract or the employer in yielding to the union’s insistence. Unquestionably the tactics Williams employed to thwart the union while he was one of its officers were disloyal and unfair. But the very fact that this is what provoked his fellow workers to act to remove him not only from the union but from the shop as well makes both what the union demanded and the employer’s responsive action discharging Williams unfair labor practices under the present Act. The board so concluded and I think the court agrees with that conclusion.
Yet, this very sequence of events which made the discharge of Williams legally indefensible is now said to make the board’s action in directing his reinstatement an abuse of discretion. With this I am unable to agree. It seems to me that what the hoard did implements the very policy which Congress has adopted in Section 8(a) (3) (B). Perhaps this case indicates the unwisdom of a policy which protects the job , , , . • r „ , security of one ousted by his fellow work-r J ... . ^ ers from their union for any reason other than non-payment of dues. But Congress has written that broad protection into the law and in my view it stands as the authoritative expression of public policy for this type of situation.
., , . , . , . . The court avoids this conclusion by point- . , , , , ing to general objectives of the whole body of federal labor relations legislation which would be impeded by enforcement of the particular policy which I find embodied in Section 8(a) (3) (B). I suspect this means no more than that the point of view represented by the original Wagner Act is not wholly consistent with some of the more recent thinking of Congress embodied in the Taft-Hartley Act. But I do not reach that point. I find a clear and specific policy in Section 8(a) (3) (B) which justifies the board’s action without reference to the broad general conceptions out of which the National Labor Relations Act emerged,
Finally, nothing like the foregoing considerations applies to National Labor Relations Board v. Fansteel Metallurgical Corp., 1939, 306 U.S. 240, 59 S.Ct. 490, 83 L.Ed. 627, 123 A.L.R. 599 and the cases which follow it. Therefore, I do not join in the court’s thinking that the Fansteel line is authority for the present decision,
I think the order of the board should be enforced,