Court Opinion

ID: 9468576
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 02:18:04.980602+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:40:55.938292
License: Public Domain

GARTH, Circuit Judge,
concurring.
I am in complete agreement with Chief Judge Seitz’s analysis and his conclusion that the broadly worded no-strike clause in Article X of the collective bargaining agreement constituted a waiver of the employees’ right to strike in the circumstances of this case. I would not rest our decision on the resolution of the waiver issue, however, but would meet head-on the question the majority finds unnecessary to address: whether, in the first place, the strike was protected activity under section 7 of the Act. In this regard, I would hold that the use of economic weapons, such as a strike, against an employer is not protected under section 7 when the object of the employees’ grievance is a matter beyond the employer’s *461control or the employer’s power to influence.
I.
Pacemaker in this case found itself caught in the crossfire between its employees and their union. The company had fulfilled its contractual responsibility of making contributions to the union’s health and welfare fund, but the Fund — over which Pacemaker had no control — had failed to pay premiums to the Fund’s insurance carrier, Republic National Life Insurance Co. As a result, Republic refused to pay the medical and hospital claims of employee beneficiaries.
The record discloses that the Fund, the Teamsters Health and Welfare Fund of Philadelphia and Vicinity — Local 158, was, practically speaking, twice removed from Pacemaker. Under its agreement with the union, Pacemaker, for each hour worked by each of its employees, paid forty cents to the Fund, which was an entity separate from the company and the union. It is conceded that Pacemaker at all times faithfully complied with this obligation. The Fund was responsible for selecting the insurance carrier and for paying the premiums for continued medical and hospital coverage of the employees. Thus, when the Fund failed to pay those premiums and Republic thereupon discontinued making benefit payments to the employees, Pacemaker was powerless to remedy the problem. The situation was well described by the union’s lawyer, who told the Board’s administrative law judge:
The private insurance carrier stopped making payments to the employees, quite frankly, for failure on the part of the fund to make contributions to the private insurance carrier. Their position was that if we don’t receive any money, we are not going to pay benefits.
This caused a problem with the employees because the employees started getting contacts from various doctors and hospitals that the bills were not getting paid. The employees went to the union to try to resolve the problem. The union tried to make its best efforts to resolve the problem. Obviously, if the fund itself being a separate entity was not able to make the payments, then the union could not really do too much for the employees.
App. at 301a-302a. Clearly, if the union could not bring the situation under control, Pacemaker, which was still another step removed from the Fund, could not.
It was in this context that the employees became restive. As their dissatisfaction with the administration of the Fund grew, the company sought to have the union resolve the Fund’s problems, but these endeavors were unsuccessful. When no signs of progress were forthcoming, Pacemaker’s employees, in an attempt to put pressure on the union to remedy the Fund’s delinquency, struck Pacemaker and demonstrated outside one of Pacemaker’s plants as well as the union’s headquarters. The strike— which, as we hold today, violated the no-strike clause of the collective bargaining agreement — forced the company temporarily to close both of its plants.
Thus, the record shows that the employees struck the company even though their grievance was not with Pacemaker, but was with the Fund. They inflicted a grave economic wound on their financially shaky employer (the company subsequently initiated Chapter XI bankruptcy proceedings) despite the fact that Pacemaker had no power to give them the relief they demanded and could not even influence the entity which did have that power.
II.
Section 7 of the Act provides that “[ejmployees shall have the right ... to engage in .. . concerted activities for the purpose of collective bargaining or other mutual aid or protection ... . ” 29 U.S.C. § 157 (1976). However, employee activities aimed at improving terms and conditions of employment can lose their section 7 protection if carried out in a disruptive or otherwise inappropriate manner. See Emporium Capwell Co. v. Western Addition Community Org., 420 U.S. 50, 95 S.Ct. 977, 43 L.Ed.2d 12 (1975) (separate bargaining by minority *462group of employees would undermine principle of collective bargaining); NLRB v. Local Union No. 1229, IBEW (Jefferson Standard), 346 U.S. 464, 477-78, 74 S.Ct. 172, 179, 98 L.Ed. 195 (1953) (disloyal employees distributed leaflets disparaging quality of employer’s product; “the means used by the [employees] .. . have deprived [them] of the protection of [section 7]”); Sullair P.T.O., Inc. v. NLRB, 641 F.2d 500 (7th Cir. 1981) (employee’s obscene language and disruptive behavior unprotected); Texas Instruments, Inc. v. NLRB, 637 F.2d 822 (1st Cir. 1981) (employees disseminated confidential wage information); National Vendors v. NLRB, 630 F.2d 1265, 1268 (8th Cir. 1980) (employees conducted disruptive meeting in company cafeteria); Abilities & Goodwill, Inc. v. NLRB, 612 F.2d 6, 9 (1st Cir. 1979) (employees struck over firing of high-ranking management official); Texaco, Inc. v. NLRB, 462 F.2d 812 (3d Cir.) (deliberately or maliciously false employee statements unprotected), cert. denied, 409 U.S. 1008, 93 S.Ct. 442, 34 L.Ed.2d 302 (1972). See generally NLRB v. Pincus Bros., Inc. — Maxwell, 620 F.2d 367, 375-77 (3d Cir. 1980) (employee circulated leaflet disparaging employer).
“[T]he general rule adopted by the courts has been to look at a variety of factors, including the reasonableness of the means of protest, in order to determine if the employees’ activities were protected.” Abilities & Goodwill, supra, 612 F.2d at 9. As the court stated in Texas Instruments, supra, 637 F.2d at 830, “Not all conduct that can, in some general sense, be characterized as an exercise of a right enumerated in section 7 is afforded the protection of the Act... . [R]ights under section 7 must in each instance be understood in relation to the concrete facts of a particular case” (citations omitted).
The argument for denying employee actions protected status is even stronger when the actions of employees unnecessarily and unfairly inflict economic harm on an employer who is neither responsible for the complained-of condition nor has any power to correct it. See NLRB v. Bretz Fuel Co., 210 F.2d 392, 397 (4th Cir. 1954). As one commentator has written, “The argument that economic pressure should be unprotected [where the employer lacks interest or control] is . . . convincing.” Getman, The Protection of Economic Pressure by Section 7 of the National Labor Relations Act, 115 U.Pa.L.Rev. 1195, 1221 (1967).
This observation is directly applicable to this case. Here Pacemaker’s employees used the company as a pawn in a crisis not of the company’s making and beyond its power to resolve. The company had to endure total disruption of its production processes even though the dispute that trig-, gered the strike was entirely between the employees and the Fund. Cf. Harnischfeger Corp. v. NLRB, 207 F.2d 575 (7th Cir. 1953). As Professor Getman has argued, “Where .. . the employer is not a party to the controversy .. . there is no reason why he should be forced to permit his business to be used as a battleground.” Getman, supra, at 1221.
The teaching of Eastex, Inc. v. NLRB, 437 U.S. 556, 98 S.Ct. 2505, 57 L.Ed.2d 428 (1978), a case cited by both parties, is not to the contrary. In Eastex, the most recent Supreme Court expression concerning protected activity, the Court held that an employer could not prohibit the distribution, in nonworking areas of the employer’s property during nonworking time, of a union newsletter that, in part, urged employees to lobby against incorporation of “right-to-work” provisions into the state constitution and criticized a presidential veto of an increase in the federal minimum wage. The employees in Eastex did not strike the company. Rather, they filed an unfair labor practice charge against Eastex seeking the right to distribute the newsletter.
Eastex argued that the distribution of the newsletter did not come within the “mutual aid or protection” language of section 7 because the newsletter did not relate to a specific dispute between the employees and their own employer over an issue which the employer had the right or power to affect. Id. at 563, 98 S.Ct. at 2511. The Court rejected the employer’s argument, *463finding “no warrant for [the company’s] view that employees lose their protection under the ‘mutual aid or protection’ clause when they seek to improve terms and conditions of employment or otherwise improve their lot as employees through channels outside the immediate employee-employer relationship.” Id. at 565, 98 S.Ct. at 2512. The Court observed that the subjects addressed in the newsletter could have a significant impact on the union’s strength at the bargaining table and on the level of wages negotiated with the employer. Id. at 569, 98 S.Ct. at 2514.
It was in this special context, however, where half the newsletter’s contents were clearly protected and where no strike occurred, that the Court rejected Eastex’s “lack of control” argument. In doing so, the Court took pains to stress the limited nature of its holding. The Court observed, for example, that “the employer ha[d] not attempted to show that distribution [of the newsletter] would interfere with plant discipline or production.” Id. at 572, 98 S.Ct. at 2515. More significantly, however, the Court acknowledged that “even when concerted activity comes within the scope of the ‘mutual aid or protection’ clause, the forms such activity permissibly may take may well depend on the object of the activity,” and proceeded to quote from Professor Getman’s article. Id. at 568 n.18, 98 S.Ct. at 2513 n.18. Thus, while Eastex bears upon the subject of protected activity and recognizes that protection may vary with the form and object of the activity, Eastex is not this case.
The form the employee activity took in this case makes the situation with which we are confronted totally different from the circumstances before the Court in Eastex. Although here, as in Eastex, the source of employee dissatisfaction lay in matters beyond the employer’s control, unlike Eastex, the means used to express the employee grievances in the instant case had a substantially greater negative impact on the innocent employer. Moreover, while in Eastex, the employer could not show how it was prejudiced by the mere distribution of a protected newsletter in nonworking areas during nonworking time, the employer here was forced by the unwarranted actions of its employees to close both its plants, thereby shutting down production.
III.
I would thus hold that on the facts of this case, where the company concededly fulfilled all its responsibilities with respect to its collective bargaining agreement and the health and welfare fund, and the employees’ grievance was solely with the Fund, the employees’ strike against the company which employed them, did not constitute protected activity within the meaning of section 7 of the Act. This being the case, I would not reach the waiver issue discussed by the majority, with whose reasoning I, in any event, agree.