Court Opinion

ID: 9419016
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 22:44:48.839795+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T09:13:02.390546
License: Public Domain

Mr. Justice Stone,
concurring in part.
I concur in so much of the Court’s decision as holds that the Board was without statutory authority to order reinstatement of those employees who were discharged on February 17, 1937. But I rest this conclusion solely on the construction of § 2 (3) and § 10 (c) of the National Labor Relations Act. By § 10 (c) the Board is given authority to reinstate in their employment only those who are “employees.” Before the Board made its order, respondent’s employees, by reason of their lawful discharge for cause, had lost their status as such, which would otherwise have been preserved to them under §2(3).
The National Labor Relations Act, as its purpose and scope are disclosed by its preamble and operative provisions and explained by the reports of. the Congressional committees recommending its enactment, Report No. 573, Senate Committee on Education and Labor, 74th Cong., 1st Sess.; Report No. 1147, House Committee on Labor, 74th Cong., 1st Sess., is aimed at securing the peaceable settlement of labor disputes by the prevention of unfair labor practices of the employer and by requiring him to bargain collectively with his employees. Since one means adopted by the Act to secure this end is thé reinstatement, by the discretionary action of the National Labor Relations Board, of employees when unfair labor *264practices have caused them to cease work, it was necessary to provide that they should not lose their status as employees by reason of that fact. This was accomplished by § 2 (3), which provides:
“The term ‘employee', shall include . . . any individual whose work has ceased as a consequence of, or in connection with, any current labor dispute or because of any unfair labor practice. . . .”
Having in mind the purposes of the Act and the end sought by the enactment of this section, I think its fair meaning is that attributed to it by the Senate Committee Report, supra, pp. 6-7, which declared:
“The bill thus observes the principle that men do: not lose their right to be considered' as employees for the purposes of this bill merely by collectively refraining from work during the course of a labor controversy. . . . And to hold that a worker who because of an unfair labor practice has been discharged or locked out or gone on strike is no longer an employee, would be to give legal sanction to an illegal act and to deny redress to the individual injured thereby.”
But it does not follow because the section preserves this right to employees where they have ceased work by reason of a labor dispute or unfair labor practice, that its language is to be read as depriving the employer of his right, which the statute does not purport to withdraw, to terminate the employer-employee relationship for reasons dissociated with the stoppage of work because of unfair labor practices. The language which saves the employee Status for those who have ceased work because of unfair labor practices does not embrace also those who have lost their status for a wholly different reason — their discharge for unlawful practices which the Act does not countenance.
*265There is nothing in the Act, read as a whole, to indicate such a purpose, and there is no language in § 2 (3) directed to such an end. I cannot attribute to Congress in the adoption of § 2 (3), explained as it was in the Senate Committee Report, a purpose to cut off the right of an employer to discharge employees who have destroyed his factory and to refuse to reemploy them, if that is the real reason for his action. If a plainer indication of such a purpose had been given by the language of § 2 (3), I should have thought it of sufficiently dubious constitutionality to require us to construe its language otherwise, if that could reasonably be done, leaving it to Congress to say so, in unmistakable language, if it really meant to impose that duty on the employer.
As to the fourteen employees who aided and abetted the sit-down strike, but who were not discharged, I think they retained their status under § 2 (3), and that the Board had power to reinstate them. Whether that power should be exercised was a matter committed to the Board’s discretion, not ours.
In other respects I concur with the decision off the Court.