Court Opinion

ID: 9419677
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 22:51:01.418642+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:22:19.934098
License: Public Domain

Mr. Justice Frankfurter,
dissenting.
On July 27, 1934, the Brotherhood of Railroad Trainmen made an agreement with petitioner, Elgin, Joliet and Eastern Railway Company, affecting its yardmen whereby the starting time for switching crews was fixed. The respondents are employed as switching crews in the Whiting, Indiana yard of petitioner. They are all members of the Brotherhood. Observance by petitioner of this yard agreement was called into question. After abortive conferences for the adjustment of these claims between officials of petitioner and of the Brotherhood, C. H. Williams, General Chairman of the Brotherhood General Grievance Committee, filed a complaint covering several grievances with the National Railroad Adjustment Board, created by the Railway Labor Act of 1934, 48 Stat. 1185, 45 U. S. C. § 151 et seq., to compel petitioner’s compliance with the agreed time. In November, 1936, the cases were duly docketed. Before they came to be heard, petitioner, on October 28, 1938, proposed settlement of numerous claims against it by the Brotherhood then pending before the Adjustment Board. Among these claims was the dispute as to starting time. Petitioner agreed for a ninety-day trial period, beginning November 15,’ 1938, to abide by the time fixed in the 1934 agreement. But its offer was conditioned “on a complete settlement and withdrawal of all cases now pending either before the board, or under discussion with this office . . . and it is further under*750stood that in the event these settlements are accepted that the claims listed in this letter cover all claims of a similar nature, and that no other claims covering the same or like situations will be presented when such claims arise from causes occurring prior to the date of this settlement.” On October 31, 1938, settlement on these terms was accepted for the yardmen by Williams, General Chairman, and S. F. Johnson, the Secretary of the Brotherhood’s General Grievance Committee. On the same day and upon request of the Brotherhood and Railway, the cases were removed from its docket by the Adjustment Board.
Later the Brotherhood filed with the Adjustment Board a second complaint claiming money damages on behalf of its members for violation of the 1934 agreement. The Board, by formal award, denied the claim on the ground that the “evidence shows that the parties to the agreement disposed of the claim here made by the letter of carrier dated October 28th, 1938, accepted by employes October 31,1938.”
Respondents then filed this suit in the District Court for damages. Petitioner invoked the 1938 settlement and the Board’s award thereon as a bar, and moved for summary judgment. Respondents resisted this motion by denying the authority of the Brotherhood officials to present their claims to the Board or to agree to the settlement. The District Court gave summary judgment for the petitioner which was reversed by the Circuit Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit on the ground that the questión of authority of the Brotherhood officials raised an issue of fact for trial by the District Court. 140 F. 2d 488. The correctness of this ruling is the important question now before us. 323 U. S. 690.
We have had recent occasion to consider the Railway Labor Act in other aspects. Switchmen’s Union v. Board, 320 U. S. 297; General Committee v. M.-K.-T. R. Co., 320 U. S. 323; General Committee v. Southern Pacific Co., *751320 U. S. 338. The complexities which the problems in those cases laid bare, make clear that the specific question immediately before us cannot be isolated from the scheme and structure of the Railway Labor Act as an entirety. The Act in turn cannot be appreciated apart from the environment out of which it came and the purposes which it was designed to serve.
From the point of view of industrial relations our railroads are largely a thing apart. The nature and history of the industry, the experience with unionization of the roads, the concentration of authority on both sides of the industry in negotiating collective agreements, the intimacy of relationship between the leaders of the two parties shaped by a long course of national, or at least regional, negotiations, the intricate technical aspects of these agreements and the specialized knowledge for which their interpretation and application call, the practical interdependence of seemingly separate collective agreements — these and similar considerations admonish against mutilating the comprehensive and complicated system governing railroad industrial relations by episodic utilization of inapposite judicial remedies.
The Railway Labor Act of 1934 is primarily an instrument of government. As such, the view that is held of the particular world for which the Act was designed will largely guide the direction of judicial interpretation of the Act. The railroad world for which the Railway Labor Act was designed has thus been summarized by one of the most discerning students of railroad labor relations: “The railroad world is like a state within a state. Its population of some three million, if we include the families of workers, has its own customs and its own vocabulary, and lives according to rules of its own making. . . . This state within a state has enjoyed a high degree of internal peace for two generations; despite the divergent interests of its component parts, the reign of law has been firmly *752established.” Garrison, The Railroad Adjustment Board: A Unique Administrative Agency (1937) 46 Yale L. J. 567, 568-69.
The Railway Labor Act of 1934 is an expression of that “reign of law” and provides the means for maintaining it. Nearly half a century of experimental legislation lies behind the Act. It is fair to say that every stage in the evolution of this railroad labor code was progressively infused with the purpose of securing self-adjustment between the effectively organized railroads and the equally effective railroad unions and, to that end, of establishing facilities for such self-adjustment by the railroad community of its own industrial controversies. These were certainly not expected to be solved by ill-adapted judicial interferences, escape from which was indeed one of the driving motives in establishing specialized machinery of mediation and arbitration. Government intervention of any kind was contemplated only as a last resort for the avoidance of calamitous strikes.
The landmarks in this history, tersely summarized, are the meager act of October 1, 1888, 25 Stat. 501, providing for voluntary arbitration; the Erdman Act of June 1, 1898, 30 Stat. 424, securing government mediation and arbitration, but applicable only to those actually engaged in train service operations; the Newlands Act of July 15, 1913, 38 Stat. 103, providing for a permanent board of mediation and also a board of arbitration; the Adamson Act of September 3, 1916, 39 Stat. 721, as to which see Wilson v. New, 243 U. S. 332; Order No. 8 of February 21, 1918, formulating the labor policy of the Government after the United States took over the railroads, see Hines, War History of American Railroads (1928), p. 155 et seq.; the more elaborate machinery established by Title III of the Transportation Act of 1920, 41 Stat. 456, 469, for adjustments of these controversies, which in its turn was repealed and replaced by the Railway Labor Act of May *75320,1926, 44 Stat. 577, legislation agreed upon between the railroads and the Brotherhoods and probably unique in having been frankly accepted as such by the President and Congress.1 The actual operation of this legislation partly disappointed the hopes of its sponsors, and led, for the still greater promotion of self-government by the railroad industry, to the Act of 1934.
The assumption as well as the aim of that Act is a process of permanent conference and negotiation between the carriers on the one hand and the employees through their unions on the other. Section 2, First, provides “It shall be the duty of all carriers.. . . and employees to exert every reasonable effort to make and maintain agreements concerning rates of pay, rules, and working conditions, and to settle all disputes, whether arising out of the application of such agreements or otherwise . . .” Section 2, Second, provides “All disputes between a carrier . . . and its . . . employees shall be considered, and, if possible, decided, with all expedition, in conference between representatives designated and authorized so to confer, respectively, by the carrier . . . and by the employees thereof interested in the dispute.” According to § 2, Sixth, “In case of a dispute . . . arising out of grievances or out of the interpretation or application of agreements concerning rates of pay, rules, or working conditions, it shall be the duty of the designated representative or representatives of such carrier . . . and of such employees, within ten days after the receipt of notice of a desire on the part of either party to confer in respect to such dispute, to specify a time and place at which such *754conference shall be held . . .” Section 3, First (i) directs that disputes growing out of grievances or the interpretation or application of agreements concerning rates of pay, rules, or working conditions be handled by conference and negotiation, including resort if necessary to the chief operating officer' of the carrier. Compliance with these statutory duties is a prerequisite to appeal to the National Railroad Adjustment Board. The purpose of this legislation is the exertion of maximum pressure toward amicable settlement between the parties. Resort to the Adjustment Board is the last step in the statutory process.
In the controversy before us an amicable adjustment between the parties — the goal of the legislation — had been achieved by pursuing the course which the Act of 1934 directed. We are now asked to nullify this settlement, arrived at after prolonged negotiations, and to open the door of litigation to new discords. Not only is it sought to revive the dispute and to restore it to the status it had before the Adjustment Board more than eight years ago. The respondents claim that after all these years they have a right to repudiate their bargaining agents and to try the authority of these agents as though this were a conventional lawsuit involving the responsibility of a principal for the conduct of his agent.
As members of their Brotherhood, respondents were of course familiar with the procedure whereby the union speaks for them both to the Railroad and before the Adjustment Board. The Brotherhood’s “Constitution and General Rules,” which the respondents made part of their case below, are clear about this. Rule No. 7 declares that, after a grievance has been transmitted to a General Grievance Committee, that Committee “shall have power to alter, amend, add to or strike out . . . any part or all of any complaint or claim submitted to the committee, subject to appeal to the entire General Committee and/or Board of Appeals. A general grievance Committee may *755authorize their chairman to handle all grievances received from local lodges with the management for settlement . . .” Respondents cannot deny that the Brotherhood officials had authority to seek compliance by the railroad with the starting time agreement through the Adjustment Board. In view of the sweeping power of the General Grievance Committee to settle grievances, the settlement that was made on behalf of the Brotherhood is invulnerable. The attack on the settlement because it was signed by only two of the three members of the Committee is frivolous. Such procedure is not at all unusual. Williams and Johnson settled other grievances in like manner, many of them involving claims for money. The Brotherhood's own rules sanction such action in that the Committee may authorize the Chairman to handle all grievances.
This is not a simple little case about an agent’s authority. Demands of the employees’ representative imply not only authority from those for whom he speaks but the duty of respect from those to whom he speaks. The carrier is under a legal duty to treat with the union’s representative for the purposes of the Railway Labor Act. Section 2, Ninth; see Virginian R. Co. v. System Federation, 300 U. S. 515. We do not have the ordinary case where a third person dealing with an ostensible agent must at his peril ascertain the agent’s authority. In such a situation a person may protect himself by refusing to deal. Here petitioner has a duty to deal. If petitioner refuses to deal with the officials of the employees’ union by challenging their authority, it does so under pain of penalty. If it deals with them on the reasonable belief that the grievance officials of the Brotherhood are acting in accordance with customary union procedure, settlements thus made ought not to be at the hazard of being jettisoned by future litigation. To allow such settlements to be thus set aside is to obstruct the smooth *756working of the Act. It undermines the confidence so indispensable to adjustment by negotiation, which is the vital object of the Act. See Division 525, Order of Railway Conductors v. Gorman, 133 F. 2d 273, 278.
But respondents claim that irrespective of the authority of the Brotherhood officials to handle claims for the enforcement of the agreed starting time, Williams did not have authority to present to the Adjustment Board the claim for damages due to respondents for petitioner’s alleged past violation of the starting-time agreement. They insist that there is no relation between a claim for money resulting from the violation of a collective agreement and a claim for the enforcement of a collective agreement. But surely this is to sever that which is organic. It wholly disregards the nature of such a collective agreement, its implications and its ramifications. In passing on the-claim for money damages arising out of the yard agreement, any tribunal would have to examine, interpret and apply the collective agreement precisely as it would if the issue were the duty to observe the agreement in the future. An award based on the application of the collective agreement would, quite apart from technical questions of res judicata, affect future claims governed by the same collective agreement whatever the particular forms in which the claims may be cast. To find here merely an isolated, narrow question of law as to past liability is to disregard the ties which bind the money controversy to its railroad environment. Such a view is blind to the fact that “all members of the class or craft to which an aggrieved employee belongs have a real and legitimate interest in the dispute. Each of them, at some later time, may be involved in -a similar dispute.” 40 Ops. Atty. Gen., No. 59 (Dec. 29, 1942) pp. 4 — 5. Indeed, such a view leaves out of consideration not only the significant bearing of the construction of the same collective agreement on parts of the carrier’s lines not immediately before the Court. It *757overlooks the relation of a provision in a collective agreement with one railroad to comparable provisions of collective agreements with other roads.
To allow the issue of authorization after an award by the Board to be relitigated in the courts is inimical to the internal government of the Brotherhood. Union membership generates complicated relations. Policy counsels against judicial intrusion upon these relations. If resort to courts is at all available, it certainly should not disregard and displace the arrangements which the members of the organization voluntarily establish for their reciprocal interests and by which they bound themselves to be governed. The rights and duties of membership are governed by the rules of the Brotherhood. Rule 10 concerns objections to official action: “Whatever action may be taken by the general grievance committee . . . shall be law to the lodges on that road until the next meeting of the board of appeals, and if any member refuses to vote or abide by the action of such general grievance committee or board of adjustment he shall be expelled from the Brotherhood for violation of obligation.” To ask courts to adjudicate the meaning of the Brotherhood rules and customs without preliminary resort to remedial proceedings within the Brotherhood is to encourage influences of disruption within the union instead of fostering these unions as stabilizing forces. Rules of fraternal organizations, with all the customs and assumptions that give them life, cannot be treated as though they were ordinary legal documents of settled meaning. “Freedom of litigation, for instance, is hardly so essential a part of the democratic process that the courts should be asked to strike down all hindrances to its pursuit. The courts are as wise, to take an example of this, in adhering to the general requirement that all available remedies within the union be exhausted before redress is sought before them as they are unwise in many of the exceptions they have grafted upon *758this rule.” Witmer, Civil Liberties and the Trade Union (1941) 50 Yale L. J. 621, 630. To an increasing extent, courts require dissidents within a union to seek interpretation of the organization’s rules and to seek redress for grievances arising out of them before appropriate union tribunals. Compare Norfolk & Western R. Co. v. Harris, 260 Ky. 132, 84 S. W. 2d 69; Agrippino v. Perrotti, 270 Mass. 55, 169 N. E. 793; Snay v. Lovely, 276 Mass. 159, 176 N. E. 791; Webb v. Chicago, R. I. & G. R. Co., 136 S. W. 2d 245.
The Railway Labor Act, as the product of long experience, is a complicated but carefully devised scheme for adjusting the relations between the two powerful groups constituting the railroad industry. It misconceives the legislation and mutilates its provisions to read into it common law notions for the settlement of -private rights. If, when a dispute arises over the meaning of a collective agreement, the legally designated railroad bargaining unit cannot negotiate with the carrier without first obtaining the specific authorization of every individual member of the union who may be financially involved in the dispute, it not only weakens the union by encouraging divisive elements. It gravely handicaps the union in its power to bargain responsibly. That is not all. Not to allow the duly elected officers of an accredited union to speak for its membership in accordance with the terms of the internal government of the union and to permit any member of the union to pursue his own interest under a collective agreement undermines the very conception of a collective agreement. It reintroduces the destructive individualism in the relations between the railroads and their workers which it was the very purpose of the Railway Labor Act to eliminate. To allow every individual worker to base individual claims on his private notions of the scope and meaning of a collective agreement, intended to lay down uniform standards for all those covered by the *759collective agreement, is to permit juries and courts to make varying findings and give varying constructions to an agreement inevitably couched in words or phrases reflecting the habits, usage and understanding of the railroad industry. Thus will be introduced those dislocating differentiations for workers in the same craft which have always been among the most fertile provocations to friction, strife, and strike in the railroad world. The Railway Labor Act, one had supposed, would be construed so as to reduce and not to multiply these seeds of strife.
In order to avoid mischievous opportunities for the assertion of individual claims by shippers as against the common interest of uniformity in construing railroad tariffs, this Court so construed the Interstate Commerce Act in the famous Abilene Cotton Oil case, 204 U. S. 426, as to withdraw from the shipper the historic common law right to sue in the courts for charging unreasonable rates. It required resort to the Interstate Commerce Commission because not to do so would result in the impairment of the general purpose of that Act. It did so because even though theoretically this Court could ultimately review such adjudications imbedded in the various judicial judgments — if a shipper could go to a court in the first instance — there would be considerations of fact which this Court could not possibly disentangle so as to secure the necessary uniformity. The beneficent rule in the Abilene Cotton Oil case was evolved by reading the Interstate Commerce Act not as though it were a collection of abstract words, but by treating it as an instrument of government growing out of long experience with certain evils and addressed to their correction. Chief Justice White’s opinion in that case was characterized by his successor, Chief Justice Taft, as a “conspicuous instance of his unusual and remarkable power and facility in statesmanlike interpretation of statute law.” 257 U. S. xxv. The provisions of the Railway Labor Act do not even *760necessitate such a creative act of adjudication as this Court in the Abilene case unanimously accomplished. The Railway Labor Act contains no embarrassing specific provision, as was true of § 22 of the Interstate Commerce Act, 24 Stat. 379, 387, calling for subordination to the main purpose of the legislation. The considerations making for harmonious adjustment of railroad industrial relations through the machinery designed by Congress in the Railway Labor Act are disregarded by allowing that machinery to be by-passed and by introducing dislocating differentiations through individual resort to the courts in the application of a collective agreement.
Since the claim before the Adjustment Board was for money, there remains the question whether its disposition was open to judicial review. The Railway Labor Act commands that the Board's “awards shall be final and binding upon both parties to the dispute, except insofar as they shall contain a money award.” § 3, First (m). But the determination here in controversy does not “contain a money award” so as to be excepted, from the final and binding effect given other awards. The obvious meaning of “money award” is an award directing the payment of money, not one denying payment. See Berryman v. Pullman Co., 48 F. Supp. 542. We are pointed to no aids to construction that should withhold us from giving the familiar term “money award” any other than its ordinary meaning as something that awards money. This construction is confirmed by comparison with the provisions of the Interstate Commerce Act dealing with reparation orders. Since both Acts came out of the same Congressional Committees one finds, naturally enough, that the provisions for enforcement and review of the Adjustment Board’s awards were based on those for reparation orders by the Interstate Commerce Commission. .Compare Railway Labor Act, § 3, First (p) with Interstate Commerce Act, as amended by § 5 of the Hepburn Act, 34 *761Stat. 584; 590, 49 U. S. C. § 16 (1), (2). If a carrier fails to comply with a reparation order, as is true of non-compliance with an Adjustment Board award, the complainant may sue in court for enforcement;, the Commission’s order and findings and evidence then become prima facie evidence of the facts stated. But a denial of a money claim by the Interstate Commerce Commission bars the door to redress in the courts. Baltimore & Ohio R. Co. v. Brady, 288 U. S. 448; I. C. C. v. United States, 289 U. S. 385, 388; Terminal Warehouse v. Pennsylvania R. Co., 297 U. S. 500, 507.
The Railway Labor Act precludes review of the Board’s award; and, since authorization of the Brotherhood officials to make the settlement is not now open to judicial inquiry, the judgment calls for reversal.
The Chief Justice, Me. Justice RobeRts and Me. Justice Jackson join in this dissent.