Court Opinion

ID: 9422492
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 23:02:53.751981+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:22:37.133993
License: Public Domain

Mr. Justice Goldberg,
with whom
Mr. Justice Brennan joins, concurring.
I concur in today’s opinion and judgment of the Court because the absence here of any countervailing union interest in retaining the grease peddlers as members coupled with the egregious nature of the conduct involved supports the District Court’s exercise of discretion in imposing the contested sanction as the “most effective . . . means of preventing a recurrence of defendants’ unlawful activities.” Ante, p. 98. As I read the stipulated record, the peddlers did not act and were not viewed by the *104union as participants in normal union activities designed to better their economic condition, but instead were from the very beginning used by union officials to effect a concededly illegal scheme to control the distribution and processing of grease.
This does not mean, and I do not regard the opinion of the Court as saying, that members may be expelled from a union when the pursuit of genuine labor objectives has collaterally resulted in transgressions of the antitrust laws.
The relief given by the District Court is not .inconsistent with these expressions. To support its order, however, that the union must terminate the membership of the grease peddlers, the court below reasoned that the expulsion was appropriate and justified because, in the absence of job or wage competition between the peddlers and other union members, the peddlers were not proper subjects of unionization. In reaching this conclusion, the court below too narrowly circumscribed the permissible area of legitimate labor union activity. To believe that labor union interests may not properly extend beyond mere direct job and wage competition is to ignore not only economic and social realities so obvious as not to need mention, but also the graphic lessons of American labor union history.
Today’s opinion of the Court thus properly notes that a labor organization may “often have a legitimate interest in soliciting self-employed entrepreneurs as members” and recognizes that permissible union interest and action extends beyond job and wage competition to other “economic interrelationship [s]Ante, p. 103. In my view, there is therefore implicit in this Court’s opinion a rejection of the District Court’s overly strict view that job or wage competition is the sole measure of the propriety of union organizational efforts.
Notwithstanding what I take to be its disapproval of the views of the district judge, the Court correctly sustains *105the judgment expelling the peddlers from membership in the union, not because there is absent the job or wage competition erroneously considered crucial by the District Court, but because there does not appear in this record any other legitimate labor union interest presently being served by organization of these peddlers.
The Court is not here required to pass upon, and does not pass upon, the existence of the antitrust violation, or whether, as an original matter, the grease peddlers might properly associate among themselves or affiliate with a sympathetic and genuinely interested union to improve their economic condition. Resolution of such issues would require careful and detailed consideration of federal labor policy, the scope of the antitrust exemption afforded labor organizations by §§ 6 and 20 of the Clayton Act and the Norris-LaGuardia Act, as interpreted by United States v. Hutcheson, 312 U. S. 219, and, in addition, the applicability here of the doctrines enunciated by this Court in cases such as Columbia River Packers Association, Inc., v. Hinton, 315 U. S. 143, and Allen Bradley Co. v. Local No. 8, 325 U. S. 797. In the present case, however, appellants stipulated in the District Court that they have violated the Sherman Act and engaged in a pattern of conduct calling for remedial injunctive relief; they offered no justification for their admittedly illegal conduct. These concessions necessarily forfeit any antitrust exemption which might otherwise have been claimed to attach. Consequently, the only question remaining is whether, having thus negatived by their stipulations the existence of any exonerating legitimate union interest, appellants may now complain that the district judge abused his discretion in fashioning a remedy which included, in addition to the enjoining of future similarly illegal conduct, expulsion of the peddlers from the union. Although, as I have indicated, I do not agree with all of *106his views, I believe that the district judge did not exceed permissible bounds in framing the decree.
The particular nature of the challenged conduct giving rise to the ultimate illegality (whether adjudicated after contest or stipulated) is, of course, immediately and directly relevant to the nature of the relief to be decreed. Relief should be effective to preclude future violations and, at the same time, should not unduly penalize the parties. Since*the conduct here goes beyond that recorded in the opinion of the Court, a brief recital of additional facts is appropriate.
The stipulated antitrust violation does not depend upon the fact of combination between the grease peddlers and the union for the purpose of bettering the economic condition of the former through limited use of collective bargaining power — an affiliation which standing alone and as an original matter might have been proper. Though not joined as defendants below, at least some of the processors purchasing grease from the peddlers were conceded to have been co-conspirators. The union business agent openly allocated sales among the processors and certain processors were completely cut off from sources of supply. On at least one occasion, processors were required to submit information concerning the volume of their grease purchases and the data supplied was used by the union as a basis for ordering an equalizing shift of business to a processor owned by a union member. Only a month earlier, the union business agent had arranged for a competitor to “help out” this same favored processor by selling for it grease which it was having trouble selling. The accommodating processor undertook the sale simply because it feared “trouble” with the union and its agent if it refused.
By virtue of the union’s activities, the peddlers’ sales of grease were ultimately wholly diverted from the six processors originally dealing with the peddlers to two *107processors, one of which was owned by a union member and in the other of which a union member was a partner. In the course of accomplishing this shift of business, at least one noncooperative processor was forced out of business.1
Such facts — all of which were stipulated — demonstrate a pattern of allocation of sales among processors and other improper practices designed to benefit certain favored processors -in which union members had a direct financial interest.
Moreover, as indicated in the opinion of the Court, appellants stipulated that the peddlers themselves are “independent businessmen” and not “employees” of the processors. We cannot overlook the force of these concessions. This case is unlike Labor Board v. Hearst Publications, 322 U. S. 111, in which nonemployee status was not merely unconceded, but the contrary was argued and shown. Here, the single paragraph in the stipulation of facts describing the nature of the peddlers’ activities does not overcome the ultimate stipulation that they were “businessmen” and not “employees.” Certainly we should not, merely by mechanically affixing naked labels imported from other contexts, decide cases on abstractions; but we cannot ignore the impact of unlimited, self-made categorizations applied by agreement in the very lawsuit before us.2
*108The import of the entire stipulated factual record is that the union neither had nor pursued any legitimate present interest in organizing the grease peddlers. Were it otherwise, that portion of the decree compelling expulsion of the peddlers from the union, in my view, could not stand. The sanction here invoked is an extreme one, and, unless confined to use but rarely and then only in the most compelling of circumstances, may become a device for unfairly and improperly fractionalizing or decimating unions.
On the circumstances presented to the Court, the judgment below is properly affirmed. The situation may change, however, and I understand the opinion of the Court to say that if a legitimate union interest in organizing the peddlers does hereafter arise, the District Court has the power, and indeed the duty, to modify the decree on application of the appellants. For these reasons, I join in the opinion of the Court.

 The union agent told the owner of the business that “if he [the agent] could learn the name of [the processor’s] . . . landlord and the buyers to whom [the processor] . . . was selling yellow grease . . . he would bring pressure through the Union to have [the processor’s] . . . lease cancelled and to have the buyers stop dealing with [it] . . . .” The agent said that he did not “want [the processor] ... in the grease business.”

 The stipulation of nonemployee status plus the absence of pursuit of any genuine labor objective negatives the existence of any “labor dispute” and eliminates the need to consider further the applicability *108of the Norris-LaGuardia Act prohibitions on specified injunctive relief. There is involved neither an extension of Allen Bradley Co. v. Local No. 3, 325 U. S. 797, nor a narrowing of the application of Norris-LaGuardia. Similarly obviated is the related question whether the substantive antitrust exemption read into the Norris-LaGuardia Act by United States v. Hutcheson, 312 U. S. 219, is coextensive with the Act’s injunctive inhibitions, so that appellants’ waiver of the former with respect to the activities and combination here challenged, see p. 105, supra, is also effective to waive the latter.