Court Opinion

ID: 9418108
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 22:08:54.452213+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:15:38.893990
License: Public Domain

Me. Justice Holmes,
dissenting.
I also think that the statute is constitutional, and but for the decision of my brethren I should have felt pretty clear about it.
As we all know, there are special labor unions of men engaged in the service of carriers. These unions exercise a direct influence upon the employment of labor in that business, upon the terms of such employment and upon the business itself. Their very existence is directed specifically to the business, and their connection with it is at least as intimate and important as that of safety couplers, and, I should think, as the liability of master to servant, matters which, it is admitted, Congress might regulate, so far as they concern commerce among the States. I suppose that it hardly would be denied that some of the relations of railroads with unions of railroad employés are closely enough connected with commerce to justify legisla,tion by Congress. If so, legislation to prevent the exclusion of such unions from employment is sufficiently near.
*191The ground on which this particular law is held bad is not so much that it deals with matters remote from commerce ' among the States, as that it interferes with the., paramount individual rights, secured by the Fifth Amendment.' The section is, in substance, a very limited interference with freedom of contract, no more. It does not require,the cárriers to employ any one. It does not forbid them to refuse to employ any one, for any reason they deem good, even where the notion of a choice of persons is a fiction, and wholesale, employment is necessary upon general principles that it might be proper to control. The section simply prohibits the moré powerful party to exact certain undertakings, or to threaten dismissal or unjustly-discriminate on certain grounds against those already employed. I" hardly can suppose that the grounds on which a contract lawfully may be made to end are less open to regulation than other terms. So I turn to the general question whether the employment can be regulated at all. I confess that I think that the right to make contracts at will that has been derived from the word liberty in the amendments has been stretched to its extreme by the decisions; but they agree, that sometimes the right may be' restrained.- "Where there is, or generally is .believed to be, an important ground of public policy for restraint the Constitution does not forbid it, whether this court agrees or disagrees with the policy pursued. It cannot be doubted that to prevent strikes, and, so far $s possible, to foster its scheme of arbitration, might be deemed by Congress an important point of policy, and I think it impossible to say that Congress might not reasonably think that'the provision in question would help a good deal to carry its policy along. But suppose the only effect really were to tend to bring about the complete unionizing of such railroad laborers as Congress can deal with, I think that object alone would justify the act. I quite agree that the question-what and how much good labor unions do, is one on which intelligent people may differ,—I think that laboring men sometimes attribute to them advantages,. as *192many attribute to combinations of capital disadvantages, that really are due to economic conditions of a far wider and deeper kind—but I could not pronounce it unwarranted if Congress should decide that to foster a strong union was for the best interest, not only of the men, but of-the railroads and the country at large.