Court Opinion

ID: 9425877
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 23:16:05.284782+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:16:21.134105
License: Public Domain

Mr. Justice Douglas,
dissenting.
I agree with my Brother Stewart that the dispute in the present ease is within the jurisdiction of the National Labor Relations Board and that that jurisdiction is exclusive of state jurisdiction. The foreign-flag ship involved in the present controversy is Liberian. Hence I add a few observations generated by Noel Mostert’s Super-ship (1974) discussing the problems of the big new oil tankers and their vast pollution of the oceans of the world. He puts Liberian-flag ships in the following perspective:
“Liberia now has the world’s largest merchant marine, followed by Japan and Britain, and her lead is rapidly increasing; flag of convenience fleets have regularly grown at rates more than twice those of world fleets as a whole. Liberia and Panama together now own, on paper, nearly a quarter of world shipping. Tankers dominate these expatriate fleets.
“Thirty-five to 40 percent of the Liberian tonnage is American-owned, and an additional 10 percent of *233it is American-financed, which helps explain where the American merchant fleet, in steady decline since the end of the war, has taken itself. According to law, American-flag ships must be built in the United States and must be three-quarters manned by Americans. American shipbuilding costs used to be double those elsewhere (inflation abroad has helped make them competitive again), and American seamen’s wages are still higher than elsewhere. . . .
“Flag of convenience operators often say that their ships, especially many of those under the Liberian flag, are among the largest, best-equipped, and most modern in the world. This may be true. But ships are only as good as the men who run them, and the record is not impressive. Old ships traditionally have a higher casualty rate than new ones. Liberian losses between 1966 and 1970 not only averaged twice as high as those of the other major maritime nations, but, contrary to the rule, the ships they were losing were on the whole new ones, certainly newer than the ones lost by the other principal merchant marines: the average age of Liberian losses in that four-year period was 8.7 years, while that of the Japanese and Europeans averaged 12 years.
“To a disconcerting degree, oil cargoes have been delivered in recent years by improperly trained and uncertificated officers aboard ships navigating with defective equipment.” Id., at 58-59.
While the Liberian-flag vessel in the present case was not an oil tanker, the quoted passages demonstrate the scope of the public interest of our people in keeping marine traffic in more responsible hands than those which the “flag of convenience” commonly uses. No public issue is today more important, at least to the life of the oceans of the world and the well-being of our own working force. Large national interests ride on today’s decision. Congress, in this type of case, has appropriately *234made the National Labor Relations Board the exclusive arbiter of the present controversy, as my Brother Stewart convincingly demonstrates. I accordingly would reverse the judgment below.