Court Opinion

ID: 9443189
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-03 19:13:33.421196+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:29:24.188991
License: Public Domain

CHASE, Circuit Judge
(dissenting in part).
I think the decision of the Board should be affirmed in its entirety. This record leaves no doubt whatever that Potter desired to work for the Childs Company and his letters of June 24, 1948 and October 23, 1948 were reasonably read by the Board as an application for a job. Failure to hire him in October was, by itself, discriminatory and an unfair labor practice as the Board held. As the Board said, “Examination of these letters reveals, however, that while they are inartistically drawn, the writer was seeking concrete relief in the form of employment. Any doubt the Company might have had about Potter’s wish to be hired following its receipt of his June 1948 letter must have been dispelled by his October 23 letter, which was written after the filing of the initial charge and the Company’s failure to make a disposition of matters discussed in the June 1948 letter. The Company’s reply of October 28, 1948, clearly shows that it considered Potter’s October letter to be a request for employment as a waiter for in it the Company refused to restore him to his former position, although it was at that time hiring waiters. Accordingly, we find that on October 23, 1948, Potter requested employment by the Company.”
Its refusal to hire .cannot be justified as merely the denial of a request for reinstatement with former rights. N. L. R. B. v. Pennwoven, Inc., 3 Cir., 194 F.2d 521, dec’d Feb. 4, 1952, is distinguishable on that ground. Such a request for reinstatement was not coupled with his request for employment until long afterward in his letter of April 10, 1949. Moreover, the letters of a laborer obviously unskilled in the niceties of the labor laws should not be read with the strictness which was the old-fashioned way to construe legal pleadings. It is enough that they told the employer that the man wanted to be hired and it is most harsh to allow the Company to flaunt the law as though it had said to him, “Well, we know you have asked for a job as a waiter and we are hiring waiters but you haven’t denied that what you really want is reinstatement with seniority and back pay. You have lost the right to make us do all that for you and so we will ignore your application for the same reason that we fired you in the first place.” Thus Potter’s failure to act within the time limited for the legal redress of one wrong has put him in a class apart. While an application by other waiters for a job with this employer need only give the employer to understand that a job is wanted, he must, if this decision is sound, be skilled enough in labor law to choose language in making application which will give him rights under the Act not only to show that he wants a job but to amount to a disclaimer, not merely an abandonment, of everything of which he had been unlawfully deprived.
Absent such a narrow approach to the interpretation of his letters of application, the finding of the Board was not clearly erroneous and should be given effect on familiar principles. Indeed, the more liberal attitude toward the interpretation of the demands of those unskilled in stating them which prevailed in our recent decision in N. L. R. B. v. Electronics Equipment Co., 2 Cir., 194 F.2d 650, dec’d February 18, 1952 should be followed here in upholding what the Board has done.