Court Opinion

ID: 9421013
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 22:56:39.200912+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:22:28.177004
License: Public Domain

Mr. Justice Frankfurter,
whom Mr. Justice Black and Mr. Justice Douglas join,
dissenting.
The issue before us is not whether this Court would have sustained the Board’s order in this case had we been charged by Congress, as we could not have been, “with the normal and primary responsibility for granting or denying enforcement of Labor Board orders.” Labor Board v. Pittsburgh S. S. Co., 340 U. S. 498, 502. The issue is whether we should reverse the Court of Appeals, which is so charged, because that court withheld immediate decision on the Board’s order and asked the Board for further light. That court found that the Board em*479ployed an improper standard as the basis for its decision. The Board judged the conduct in controversy by finding it “indefensible.” The Court of Appeals held that by “giving ‘indefensible’ a vague content different from ‘unlawful,’ the Board misconceived the scope of the established rule.” 91 U. S. App. D. C. 333, 335, 202 F. 2d 186, 188. Within “unlawful” that court included activities which “contravene . . . basic policies of the Act.” The Court of Appeals remanded the case for the Board’s judgment whether the conduct of the employees was protected by § 7 under what it deemed “the established rule.”
On this central issue — whether the Court of Appeals rightly or wrongly found that the Board applied an improper criterion — this Court is silent. It does not support the Board in using “indefensible” as the legal litmus nor does it reject the Court of Appeals’ rejection of that test. This Court presumably does not disagree with the assumption of the Court of Appeals that conduct may be “indefensible” in the colloquial meaning of that loose adjective, and yet be within the protection of § 7.
Instead, the Court, relying on § 10 (c) which permits discharges “for cause,” points to the “disloyalty” of the employees and finds sufficient “cause” regardless of whether the handbill was a “concerted activity” within § 7. Section 10 (c) does not speak of discharge “for disloyalty.” If Congress had so written that section, it would have overturned much of the law that had been developed by the Board and the courts in the twelve years preceding the Taft-Hartley Act. The legislative history makes clear that Congress had no such purpose but was rather expressing approval of the construction of “concerted activities” adopted by the Board and the courts.1 Many of the legally recognized tactics and weapons of *480labor would readily be condemned for “disloyalty” were they employed between- man and man in friendly personal relations. In this connection it is significant that the ground now taken by the Court, insofar as it is derived from the provision of § 10 (c) relating to discharge “for cause,” was not invoked by the Board in justification of its order.
To suggest that all actions which in the absence of a labor controversy might be “cause” — or, to use the words commonly found in labor agreements, “just cause” — for discharge should be unprotected, even when such actions were undertaken as “concerted activities, for the purpose of collective bargaining,” is to misconstrue legislation designed to put labor on a fair footing with management. Furthermore, it would disregard the rough and tumble of strikes, in the course of which loose and even reckless language is properly discounted.
“Concerted activities” by employees and dismissal “for cause” by employers are not dissociated legal criteria under the Act. They are like the two halves of a pair of shears. Of course, as the Conference Report on the Taft-Hartley Act said, men on strike may be guilty of conduct “in connection with a concerted activity” which properly constitutes “cause” for dismissal and bars reinstatement.2 But § 10 (c) does not obviate the necessity for a determination whether the distribution of the handbill here was a legitimate tool in a labor dispute or was so “improper,” as the Conference Report put it, as to be denied the protection of § 7 and to constitute a discharge “for cause.” It is for the Board, in the first instance, to make these evaluations, and a court of appeals does not travel beyond its proper bounds in asking the Board for greater explicitness in light of the correct legal standards for judgment.
*481The Board and the courts of appeals will hardly find guidance for future cases from this Court’s reversal of the Court of Appeals, beyond that which the specific facts of this case may afford. More than that, to float such imprecise notions as “discipline” and “loyalty” in the context of labor controversies, as the basis of the right to discharge, is to open the door wide to individual judgment by Board members and judges. One may anticipate that the Court’s opinion will needlessly stimulate litigation.
Section 7 of course only protects “concerted activities” in the course of promoting legitimate interests of labor. But to treat the offensive handbills here as though they were circulated by the technicians as interloping outsiders to the sustained dispute between them and their employer is a very unreal way of looking at the circumstances of a labor controversy. Certainly there is nothing in the language of the Act or in the legislative history to indicate that only conventional placards and handbills, headed by a trite phrase such as “UNFAIR TO LABOR,” are protected. In any event, on a remand the Board could properly be asked to leave no doubt whether the technicians, in distributing the handbills, were, so far as the public could tell, on a frolic of their own or whether this tactic, however unorthodox, was no more unlawful than other union behavior previously found to be entitled to protection.
It follows that the Court of Appeals should not be reversed.

 H. R. Rep. No. 245, 80th Cong., 1st Sess. 27-28; H. R. Rep. No. 510, 80th Cong., 1st Sess. 38-39.

 H. R. Rep. No. 510, 80th Cong., 1st Sess. 39.