Court Opinion

ID: 9478303
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 06:45:30.410071+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:46:21.264174
License: Public Domain

DAVID A. NELSON, Circuit Judge,
dissenting in part.
That the maritime law has not been “preempted” by the federal labor law hardly means that it cannot be influenced by it. The substantial law-creating function that federal admiralty courts have exercised for almost two centuries did not suddenly disappear once those courts had created the maritime tort of retaliatory discharge. No comparable law-creating function was vested in the federal courts in the Lingle case, because the tort law governing the retaliatory discharge asserted by the plaintiff there was Illinois law — and when federal courts apply state law, they must take that law as they find it. Trident Center v. Connecticut General Life Insurance Co., 847 F.2d 564 (9th Cir.1988). The action brought against the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway Company in the Buell case, similarly, was a statutory action the parameters of which were set, in theory, by Congress; but Mr. Merchant’s case against the American Steamship Company is brought under non-statutory general maritime law, as the complaint alleges, and Congress having remained silent on this matter, the parameters of a maritime retaliatory discharge case must be determined by the courts of admiralty. As long as the legitimate interests of the seamen who are its wards do not dictate otherwise, I see no reason why a court of admiralty should not make reasonable efforts to harmonize maritime law with the general federal law.7
There can be no question, as Maddox and its progeny make clear, that general federal labor law requires the exhaustion of mandatory grievance procedures established by representatives of labor and management in the collective bargaining process. This is a relatively new rule; both on land and at sea, collective bargaining agreements themselves are relatively new. Two hundred years ago, when the Framers adopted a Constitution stating that the federal judicial power shall extend “to all cases of admiralty and maritime jurisdiction,” the individual seaman had relatively little economic power. The fairness of the treatment accorded a seaman after he had signed on for a voyage depended largely on the benevolence of his employer, as fortified by the benevolence of the courts of admiralty. But that is no longer true; seamen are now represented by powerful labor unions that have shown themselves capable of negotiating comprehensive labor agreements giving seamen rights that would have been undreamed of in *212years gone by. Mr. Merchant was the beneficiary of just such an agreement.
New occasions, as the old hymn reminds us, teach new duties. Maritime workers are now employed under collective bargaining agreements no different, in character, from those that regulate employment in a host of land-based industries, and I see no reason why maritime courts should ignore that fact. See Gardiner v. Sea-Land Service, Inc., 786 F.2d 943, 949 (9th Cir.), cert. denied, 479 U.S. 924, 107 S.Ct. 331, 93 L.Ed.2d 303 (1986), where the court held that although maritime law establishing the seaman’s right to maintenance has not been preempted by federal labor legislation, the rate of maintenance may be subject to the negotiation process, and the rate negotiated by his union may be binding on the seaman as a matter of maritime law.
In the case at bar, as in Gardiner, “there has been no allegation that the collective bargaining agreement as a whole is unfair or inadequate.” See Gardiner, 786 F.2d at 949. There has been no allegation here that the collective bargaining agreement does not prohibit retaliatory discharges, and no allegation that the agreement does not provide an effective remedy for any such discharge. If the remedy fashioned by an admiralty court in the absence of a collective bargaining agreement might be more expansive than that provided by the contractual grievance procedure that is before us in this case, I cannot say — and I do not understand Mr. Merchant to argue — that the contract remedy, viewed in the context of the other benefits obtained in the give and take of the bargaining process, is not fair and reasonable. I note, finally, that Mr. Merchant has never suggested that his union was at fault in not pursuing the grievance to conclusion.
Against this background I do not think that it would ill become “the humane and liberal character of proceedings in admiralty” to hold that Mr. Merchant’s maritime law remedy for a retaliatory discharge is the remedy negotiated for him by his union.8 I would interpret the maritime law as requiring Mr. Merchant to exhaust that remedy, just as the general labor law would require a worker in a steel mill or automobile plant to exhaust his or her contractual remedies. Mr. Merchant’s contract remedy admittedly not having been exhausted, I would affirm the dismissal of the complaint.

. State courts can expound state common law in a way federal courts cannot, of course, and if the harmonizing of federal maritime law with federal labor law creates an incongruity with state tort law, state courts can eliminate the incongruity, if they wish, by conforming the state rule to the federal rule. Federal courts may not require state courts to do so, but I see nothing unfair or incongruous in federal courts declining to conform federal maritime law to state tort law where state courts choose to march to their own drummer.

. The same rule would apply to any other member of the collective bargaining unit, naturally, whether a member of the union or not; all seamen in the unit would be treated exactly alike regardless of union membership.