Court Opinion

ID: 9427588
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 23:21:16.087699+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:23:08.245572
License: Public Domain

Mr. Justice Blackmun,
with whom The Chief Justice, Mr. Justice Rehnquist, and Mr. Justice Stevens join,
concurring in the result.
The Court now adopts a per se rule that a union's breach of its duty of fair representation can never render it liable for *53punitive damages, no matter how egregious its breach maybe. I seriously doubt both the correctness and the wisdom of this holding. Whatever the merits of the Court’s per se rule, however, there is no need to propound such a blanket proscription in this particular case. The union’s conduct here betrayed nothing more than negligence, and thus presented an inappropriate occasion for awarding punitive damages under any formula. In order to dispose of this case, therefore, the Court need hold only that the trial judge erred as a matter of law in submitting the punitive damages issue to the jury; this is the holding I would adopt. Inasmuch as the Court reaches to outlaw punitive damages in all unfair representation cases, I shall attempt to show why I think the Court errs and why I concur only in the result.
A
Because the duty of fair representation is judicially created, the consequences of its breach necessarily are left to judicial determination. “The appropriate remedy for a breach of a union’s duty of fair representation,” the Court wrote in Vaca v. Sipes, 386 U. S. 171, 195 (1967), “must vary with the circumstances of the particular breach.” Depending on the circumstances of the particular breach, the Court wrote in Steele v. Louisville & N. R. Co., 323 U. S. 192, 207 (1944), “the statute contemplates resort to the usual judicial remedies of injunction and award of damages.” These cases make clear that a court, seeking a remedy to match the union’s wrong, has at its disposal the full panoply of tools traditionally used by courts to do justice between parties. Punitive damages, being one of these tools, thus are presumptively available for use in appropriate cases, unless Congress has directed otherwise. Since Congress has never expressly interdicted their use, the Court’s decision to ban punitive damages from the arsenal necessarily rests upon inference — upon a perception that punitive damages in unfair representation *54suits are per se inconsistent with “federal labor policy.” The Court proffers four main theories to support this inference. I find none of them persuasive.
First, the Court discerns in Vaca and Steele a “compensation principle,” a principle supposedly dictating that a damages award may “make the injured employee whole,” but may do no more. Ante, at 49, and n. 12. If these cases do embody a “compensation principle” — really, a neologism in this area of the law — it is a principle of a vastly different sort from that on which the Court relies. Steele and Vaca assuredly do stand for the proposition that a worker injured by his union’s breach of duty must at least be made whole. In Steele the Court held the plaintiffs entitled to a judicial damages remedy inasmuch as no “adequate administrative remedy” was available. 323 U. S., at 206-207. In Vaca it refused to find exclusive jurisdiction of unfair representation suits in the National Labor Relations Board, lest victims of union discrimination, owing to the Board’s limited remedial powers, on occasion be left remediless. 386 U. S., at 182-183. And in Vaca it also refused to limit judicial relief to a decree compelling arbitration of the underlying grievance, reasoning that an arbitrator might lack power to award damages against the union, and holding instead that “the court should be free to decide the contractual claim and to award the employee appropriate damages or equitable relief.” Id., at 196. In Vaca and Steele, in other words, the Court held that a worker’s remedies must include damages so that in all cases he would be fully compensated. But in neither case did it hold that the worker’s remedies must exclude damages to the extent they rise above the full compensation norm. The Court has read into Vaca’s affirmative compensation policy a negative pregnant; it has transformed its liberal “compensation principle” into a parsimonious limiting rule; it has converted the floor beneath the injured employee’s remedies into a ceiling on top of them.
*55Vaca and Steele, to my mind, contain no such negative pregnant. In Vaca the jury had awarded the worker both compensatory and punitive damages, 386 U. S., at 173; the Court held that “such damages are not recoverable from the Union in the circumstances of this case,” id., at 195, pointing out that “all or almost all” of the worker’s damages were attributable to the employer, not to the union. Id., at 198. Vaca stands only for the proposition that a union not chargeable with compensatory damages may not be taxed with punitive damages either. If Vaca contains any negative pregnant, it is that when a union is chargeable with compensatory damages, it may be taxed with punitive damages too. In Steele, the Court held that “the statute contemplates resort to the usual judicial remedies of injunction and award of damages.” 323 U. S., at 207. This language, read in context, seems expansive to me. The Court now, by italicizing “usual,” implies that punitive damages, being an extraordinary sanction, are an “unusual remedy,” and hence outside Steele’s remedial compass. Ante, at 49. This reading is most strained. The Court’s italics may make its point clear, but they do not make its argument correct, and they provide no substitute for a fairminded appraisal of what Steele says. Neither Vaca nor Steele, in my view, supports the negative “compensation principle” upon which the Court relies.
The Court’s second reason for banishing punitive damages from the pantheon, closely related to the first, is that federal labor policy is “essentially remedial” and hence inhospitable to punitive awards. Ante, at 52. The Court cites two major cases to support this theory. Neither is apposite. In Republic Steel Corp. v. NLRB, 311 U. S. 7 (1940), the Court held that the Board cannot order punitive sanctions. But the question in that case was whether “Congress [had] conferred the power upon the Board to impose such requirements.” Id., at 10. The question, in other words, was simply one of the Board’s statutory competence; the Court *56decided that punitive sanctions were “beyond the Board’s authority” and that it lacked “jurisdiction” to impose them. Id., at 11, 13. Republic Steel has no pertinence here, since the federal courts have both the jurisdiction and the authority to impose punitive sanctions in their efforts to devise a federal law of remedies. In Teamsters v. Morton, 377 U. S. 252 (1964), the Court held that punitive damages may not be recovered in § 303 suits for damages from secondary boycotts. But Morton was a case of statutory construction. Section 303 expressly authorizes an employer’s recovery only of “the damages by him sustained.” 29 U. S. C. § 187 (b). “Punitive damages for violation of § 303,” the Court reasoned in Morton, “conflict with the congressional judgment, reflected both in the language of the federal statute and in its legislative history, that recovery for an employer’s business losses caused by a union’s peaceful secondary activities . . . should be limited to actual, compensatory damages.” 377 U. S., at 260 (footnotes omitted). Since Congress has expressed no such prohibition on punitive damages in unfair representation suits, Morton is simply inapposite here. Neither Republic Steel nor Morton, therefore, supports the Court’s invocation of an “essentially remedial” theory in the fair representation area.
The third reason the Court gives in support of its per se rule is that punitive damages awards “could deplete union treasuries, thereby impairing the effectiveness of unions as collective-bargaining agents.” Ante, at 50-51. It is true that Vaca, in enunciating its formula for apportioning damages in wrongful-discharge cases, said that “[i]t could be a real hardship on the union” to pay damages in certain circumstances. 386 U. S., at 197. But the Court was not talking about unions’■ fiscal soundness; one searches the opinion in vain for references to “depletion of union treasuries” or “impairment 6f union effectiveness in collective bargaining.” What Vaca said was that it could be a real hardship to make *57a union pay “damages attributable solely to the employer’s breach of contract.” Ibid. It is, obviously, a “real hardship” for anyone, regardless of his wealth, to be forced to pay money for something that was not his fault. And even if Vaca were read to evince concern for union treasuries, even in cases where the union is at fault, this concern would not support the Court’s proscription of punitive damages where the union’s fault is egregious. As the Court notes, ante, at ’ 48, the damages a union will be forced to pay in a typical unfair representation suit are minimal; under Vaca’s apportionment formula, the bulk of the award will be paid by the employer, the perpetrator of the wrongful discharge, in a parallel § 301 action. See 386 U. S., at 197-198. Union treasuries, in other words, will emerge unscathed in the general run of unfair representation cases. Given this, it can work no undue hardship on union fiscal soundness to permit punitive awards in those rare cases where the union has notoriously misbehaved.
The fourth theory underpinning the Court’s per se rule is that “the prospect of punitive damages in cases such as this could curtail the broad discretion that Vaca afforded unions in handling grievances,” and thus “could disrupt the responsible decisionmaking essential to peaceful labor relations.” Ante, at 51, 52. The Court’s theory seems to be that a union, fearing punitive damages, might become more vigilant in processing workers’ grievances'; that this vigilance might lead unions to process frivolous grievances; that this frivolity might antagonize the employer; and that this antagonism might beget disharmony at the bargaining table. This reasoning seems tenuous to me. Surely, the Court cannot believe that such airy speculations will induce union shop stewards to abandon all vestiges of common sense as they go about their diurnal chores. And even if the prospect of punitive damages did operate to chill a union’s reason “in cases such as this,” no Member of the Court is proposing to *58award punitive damages “in cases such as this.” Everyone agrees that punitive damages here were improper. The question is whether punitive damages are also to be outlawed in cases, unlike this one, where the union’s conduct has been truly egregious. A little chilling of union “discretion” in those cases would not bother me.
B
The Court’s four proffered reasons in support of a per se ban on punitive damages thus leave me unpersuaded. I am not alone in feeling this way, for no Court of Appeals to consider the question has embraced the per se rule the Court today goes out of its way to adopt. As the Court observes, ante, at 45-46, the Fourth Circuit, followed by the Tenth in this case, has approved of punitive damages in unfair representation cases. Harrison v. United Transportation Union, 530 F. 2d 558, 563-564 (1975), cert. denied, 425 U. S. 958 (1976). The Eighth Circuit has expressed the view that punitive damages may be awarded where the union is guilty of “outrageous or extraordinary conduct.” Butler v. Teamsters Local 823, 514 F. 2d 442, 454, cert denied, 423 U. S. 924 (1975). The Ninth Circuit, while barring punitive damages on the facts, restricted its holding to “grievances of the kind alleged” in the case. Williams v. Pacific Maritime Assn., 421 F. 2d 1287, 1289 (1970). Even the Third Circuit, upon whose decision the Court relies to make out a Circuit conflict here, ante, at 45-46, declined to embrace the Court’s per se approach, refusing to “decide whether any circumstances exist in which a punitive-type remedy . . . for union misconduct might be implied under the Railway Labor Act,” and holding only that punitive damages were unavailable where (as in that case) no actual damages had been shown. Deboles v. Trans World Airlines, Inc., 552 F. 2d 1005, 1019, cert. denied, 434 U. S. 837 (1977).
*59Equally instructive, in my view, are Court of Appeals cases upholding punitive damages awards in suits brought by workers against unions under the Landrum-Griffin Act. That Act outlines a “bill of rights” for union members, 29 U. S. C. § 411 (a), and provides that actions for violation of those rights may be had to recover “such relief (including injunctions) as may be appropriate.” § 412. Every Circuit to consider the question has held that punitive damages are “appropriate relief” when a union’s conduct manifests “actual malice or reckless or wanton indifference” to members’ speech and associational rights. Boilermakers v. Braswell, 388 F. 2d 193, 199-201 (CA5), cert. denied, 391 U. S. 935 (1968); Cooke v. Orange Belt Dist. Council, 529 F. 2d 815, 820 (CA9 1976); Morrissey v. National Maritime Union, 544 F. 2d 19, 24-25 (CA2 1976); Keene v. IUOE Local 624, 569 F. 2d 1375, 1381-1382, and n. 8 (CA5 1978). These courts noted that punitive damages would serve a legitimate deterrent purpose in appropriate cases, Braswell, 388 F. 2d, at 200; Cooke, 529 F. 2d, at 820, and held that “[i]f punitive damages can be awarded against other defendants, they can be awarded against unions as well.” Morrissey, 544 F. 2d, at 25. This reasoning, I think, is equally in point here. The Court properly reserves decision on Landrum-Griffin cases, ante, at 47 n. 9, but its pronouncements about “[t]he compensation principle,” about the “windfall” nature of punitive damages, about the need to safeguard union treasuries, and about the “essentially remedial” quality of federal labor policy, all would seem to apply with equal force to § 412 suits, and they leave me uneasy. Although the Court professes willingness to draw hairline distinctions between different types of tort suits brought by workers against unions under federal labor laws, this willingness, in my view, only suggests how tenuous is the evidence of “congressional intent” on which the Court relies to back up its -per se rule here.
*60c
The Court of Appeals’ unanimous refusal to erect a per se bar to punitive damages against unions, both in unfair representation cases and in Landrum-Griffin cases, seems judicious to me. If a union’s conduct should reveal intentional racial discrimination, deliberate personal animus, or conscious infringement of speech and associational freedoms, I can discern no principle of federal labor policy that stands in the way of a punitive award. Punitive damages in such an exceptional case will serve at least to deter egregious union conduct, and Vaca makes clear that deterrence is a proper objective in unfair representation actions. See 386 U. S., at 187. If the Court feels obliged to devise some “careful balance of individual and collective interests” here, ante, at 48, the solution, in my view, is not to ban punitive damages across the board, but to restrict them to their proper sphere, namely, to those rare cases where the union’s conduct can truly be described as outrageous.
For these reasons, I would hesitate to embrace the Court’s per se rule even in a case that squarely presented that question for decision. What I find particularly hard to fathom is the Court’s willingness to promulgate a per se rule here, where the pronouncement is manifestly unnecessary to decision. This case involves no racial discrimination, no trampling on workers’ “bill of rights”; the record does not suggest — indeed, respondent does not even contend — that the union’s conduct was motivated by personal hostility. For all this record shows, the union, in neglecting to act promptly on respondent’s grievance, was simply following its standard operating procedure, a procedure admittedly inappropriate here, given the time constraints under which the union was operating, but a procedure for whose inappropriateness in this case respondent himself was at least partly responsible, since it was he who failed to notify the union until 52 days of the contract’s 60-day limit had expired. The union’s conduct, in *61other words, was negligent or, at worst, grossly negligent. No court, to my knowledge, has ever held that negligence can form the basis for a proper punitive damages award. Especially should this be so in cases arising under the federal labor statutes.
To decide this case, in sum, the Court need hold only that the trial judge erred as a matter of law in submitting the punitive damages issue to the jury. Because the Court goes further and proscribes punitive awards in much more difficult and questionable situations, not presented here, I cannot join the opinion and I concur in the result only.