Court Opinion

ID: 9636424
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-22 14:28:24.682338+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:09:45.647961
License: Public Domain

WALLER, Circuit Judge
(dissenting).
The controversy arose over whether the employees of the Petredis and Fryer electrical sub-contractors, engaged in wiring a movie theatre, should be discharged from the job by the general contractor because those employees were members of an independent union, or a union not affiliated with the A. F. of L. unions to which the employees of other contractors belonged.
Petredis and Fryer were the sole complainants before the Board against the several unions. The theatre owner, the main contractor, the other sub-contractors, the suppliers of materials to the contractor and sub-contractors, were not brought in either as complainants or respondents. So the simple question involved is what would have happened to interstate commerce if the employees of Petredis and Fryer had, or had not, been “pulled off the job” and if the carpenter and his helper and the sheet metal worker had continued to refuse to work during the few days remaining before completion of the job.
In an effort to make a showing of sub-stantiality in the interstate commerce alleged to have been affected, the Board was not content to rest upon the effect on interstate commerce that would be achieved by a discharge of Petredis and Fryer as subcontractors or, that is, the amount of interstate commodities which Petredis and Fryer would thereafter require in completion of the wiring of the theatre; but in order to undertake to sustain its jurisdiction, the Board deemed it appropriate to aggregate not only the amount of supplies originating out of the state and purchased by Dill and the several sub-contractors, but it also undertook to cumulate the supplies originating out of the state purchased by all of the merchants and suppliers of Dill and the sub-contractors. The Board was not content to rely upon the interstate supplies used in the theatre job purchased by the general and sub-contractors, nor the amount of the supplies of the merchants sold for the theatre job, but it also included all such supplies purchased by the sub-contractors or suppliers for any purpose or any use during the entire year, 1948, and without consideration of the fact that any effect upon interstate commerce of the commodities already put into the nearly completed theatre was water over the dam. I cannot conceive that the interstate commerce in goods not used in the theatre job, or goods already placed in the job, or goods already delivered to the job, or goods used in some other job without the scope of the labor controversy here, could be substantially affected by the fact that a carpenter, his helper, and a sheet metal worker declined to work with the employees of the electrical sub-contractor. The dragging in by the Board of all of the materials purchased, regardless of time or use by the contractor, the subcontractors, and the merchants who sold to the contractor and sub-contractors during an entire year is comparable to a razor back sow, which, in making her bed in the woods, indiscriminately rakes together all the available vegetation, leaves, sticks, and straw, into a pile large enough to allow her to take refuge therein.
To include the purchasers of local merchants who sold material during the year to the general- and sub-contractors is, in my humble judgment, too remote, and' if the interstate commerce of merchants who are wholly disconnected with the controversy can be accumulated in the endeavor to show substantiality, then not only every merchant employer, from Bill Grimes at the cross roads near Yellow Rabbit to John Wanamaker of Philadelphia, whose sales are derived in part from commodities acquired from out of the state, but every employer who buys from such merchant any such materials to use in the construction of any store, whether it be that of Bill Grimes or that of John Wanamaker, would be under the jurisdiction of the Board.
It seems to me unnecessary to make excursions into the chimerical in order to give the Act the reasonable and practical enforcement that should be ascribed to the intent and purpose of Congress.