Court Opinion

ID: 9496289
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 16:22:32.087614+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:57:28.646409
License: Public Domain

EASTERBROOK, Circuit Judge,
concurring in the judgment.
The National Labor Relations Board has asked us to overrule Bob Evans Farms, Inc. v. NLRB, 168 F.3d 1012 (7th Cir. 1998), which held that a strike is protected as concerted activity only if “reasonable” in relation to the employees’ goals and the injury it inflicts on the employer. In response to such a request we might (i) reaffirm Bob Evans, (ii) invoke stare deci-sis to bypass debate about its soundness, (iii) declare that the rule of Bob Evans does not matter to this case (this was the Board’s alternative holding), or (iv) overrule Bob Evans. Instead my colleagues critique Bob Evans, imply that it is incompatible with NLRB v. Washington Aluminum Co., 370 U.S. 9, 82 S.Ct. 1099, 8 L.Ed.2d 298 (1962), suggest that part of the Bob Evans approach may be salvageable when the walkout is “in protest against supervisors’-misconduct” (maj. op. at 749), discuss whether “reasonableness” might be essential when labor has short-term monopoly power (maj. op. at 751), and only then employ option (iii) from my list. This leaves the law of the circuit in limbo. Will the next panel finish off the wounded Bob Evans or nurse it back to health? How should people behave in the interim? When may labor strike? When may employers replace workers without incurring large back-pay awards? How should the *753NLRB decide the next ease in its queue? Appellate courts ought to do what they can to make predictable the legal consequences of people’s actions; instead my colleagues elect to fuzz things up, increasing the future costs of both litigation and the conduct of labor relations.
There is much to be said for the option of resting on stare decisis. Appellate courts are at loggerheads about this question. On one side we have Bob Evans and, e.g., Yesterday’s Children, Inc. v. NLRB, 115 F.3d 36, 45 (1st Cir.1997); Dobbs Houses v. NLRB, 325 F.2d 531, 538-39 (5th Cir.1963). On the other side, supporting the Board, are at least two circuits. See, e.g., Arrow Electric Co. v. NLRB, 155 F.3d 762, 765 (6th Cir.1998); First National Bank of Omaha v. NLRB, 413 F.2d 921, 923-24 (8th Cir.1969). Restless movement from one side of this conflict to another will not make it go away; sooner or later, either Congress or the Supreme Court must bring harmony. Until that happens, judicial resources will be conserved, and predictability increased, if each circuit that has reached a decision sticks with it.
If we are to reopen the merits, however, as the majority does, we should come to a conclusion and overrule Part IV of Bob Evans, 163 F.3d at 1022-24, the portion devoted to this issue. In Washington Aluminum the Supreme Court said that reasonableness does not play any role in the identification of protected concerted conduct — that “it has long been settled that the reasonableness of workers’ decisions to engage in concerted activity is irrelevant to the determination of whether a labor dispute exists or not.” 370 U.S. at 16, 82 S.Ct. 1099. The Court followed up by stating that when concerted activity in a labor dispute is covered by the Act, only steps that are “unlawful, violent or in breach of contract ... [or] characterized as ‘indefensible’ because they ... show a disloyalty to the workers’ employer” are subject to penalty. Id. at 17, 82 S.Ct. 1099 (footnotes omitted). This leaves some loose ends. Don’t all strikes show “disloyalty”? What does “indefensible” mean? The Justices did not suggest, however, that their opinion should be read like a statute. The sentence I have just quoted obtained the list (unlawful, violent, etc.) from decisions of the NLRB that had won approval in earlier suits; it did not suggest that the list was exclusive or something to be imposed on the Board. Because the National Labor Relations Act is silent on how far protection extends to employees’ concerted action, the Board has leeway to make federal labor policy. We should respect the agency’s decisions rather than try to tease answers out of old judicial language that was not designed to settle all aspects of the problem.
Bob Evans went off the tracks by asking, 163 F.3d at 1016-20, whether Chevron U.S.A Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc., 467 U.S. 837, 104 S.Ct. 2778, 81 L.Ed.2d 694 (1984), obliges the judiciary to implement all doctrines that the Board proclaims when resolving unfair-labor-practice charges. This is a misleading question. Chevron, like Washington Aluminum, is an opinion rather than a statute. It reflects older doctrines recognizing that the Executive Branch possesses discretion when Congress has delegated interpretive authority, as the National Labor Relations Act delegates to the Board. See United States v. Mead Corp., 533 U.S. 218, 229-31 & n. 12, 121 S.Ct. 2164, 150 L.Ed.2d 292 (2001). The Supreme Court has told us that the Board may use administrative adjudication to fill in the statutory gaps. See Allentown Mack Sales & Service, Inc. v. NLRB, 522 U.S. 359, 364-65, 118 S.Ct. 818, 139 L.Ed.2d 797 (1998); Holly Farms Corp. v. NLRB, 517 U.S. 392, 116 S.Ct. 1396, 134 L.Ed.2d 593 (1996); ABF Freight System, Inc. v. *754NLRB, 510 U.S. 317, 324-25, 114 S.Ct. 835,127 L.Ed.2d 152 (1994); NLRB v. Bell Aerospace, 416 U.S. 267, 94 S.Ct. 1757, 40 L.Ed.2d 134 (1974). The panel in Bob Evans said that the Board had arbitrarily failed to consider the bearing of the employees’ chosen means of protest. The Board has since rectified any omission: In the decision under review it considered whether workers need extra justification for a work stoppage, as opposed to some other concerted action. It gave a negative answer, explicitly rejected the analysis of Bob Evans, and reiterated a view it has held for more than half a century. It is no longer possible (if it ever was) to attribute the Board’s position to carelessness or oversight.
Courts must respect the Board’s plausible interpretations unless they contradict a federal statute. See, e.g., Auciello Iron Works, Inc. v. NLRB, 517 U.S. 781, 787-88, 116 S.Ct. 1754, 135 L.Ed.2d 64 (1996); NLRB v. Curtin Matheson Scientific, Inc., 494 U.S. 775, 786-87, 110 S.Ct. 1542, 108 L.Ed.2d 801 (1990). The Board’s conclusion that strikes and other walkouts are protected as concerted activity whether or not they are “reasonable” does not contradict any statute, and it is compatible with the premise that wages and working conditions grow out of a test of economic strength. Labor may resort to strikes and work-to-rule campaigns; workers may quit individually or en masse. Employers may use lockouts and permanent replacements and, after bargaining to impasse, may implement terms that workers abhor. Neither labor nor management must show that any of these steps is “reasonable.”
I do not think that cases such as Alaska Packers’ Ass’n v. Domenico, 117 F. 99 (9th Cir.1902), or Contempo Design, Inc. v. Chicago & Northeast Illinois District Council of Carpenters, 226 F.3d 535 (7th Cir.2000) (en banc), are helpful when asking whether workers must use collective action short of a work stoppage. These opinions ask not simply whether one side had the other over a barrel but also whether the side with leverage had promised by contract not to use it. The seamen in Alaska Packers’ Ass’n agreed to wage terms before embarking on the voyage; once at sea, after it was too late to hire new hands, they refused to honor these terms. Just so in Contempo Design, where a strike during the busiest part of the season broke a promise. Washington Aluminum tells us that strikes in breach of contract are not protected as concerted activity. But Trompler’s employees were not committed by contract to work on the day in question (or any other) and thus had full use of all economic tools.
Unions often negotiate to acquire some bilateral-monopoly power, and when they do they can’t be forbidden to use it. For example, a union of resort workers may insist that its collective bargaining agreements expire just before the hotel’s high season. If the workers strike immediately on the contract’s expiration, would they be obliged to show that their no-contract, no-work policy was “reasonable” in relation to the employer’s losses? Surely not. Or consider craft unions, which organize small parts of the labor force that may be able to hold up large projects. Cf. American Hospital Ass’n v. NLRB, 499 U.S. 606, 111 S.Ct. 1539, 113 L.Ed.2d 675 (1991) (discussing effect of the number of bargaining units at a single work site). If five tower-crane workers walk off, a hundred-million-dollar construction project may come to a halt. The union doubtless hopes that this will lead to a handsome wage increase; is the strike unlawful because one small union has used a strategic position to line its members’ pockets? Again the answer is no. Finally, suppose workers at the Federal Express hub in Memphis go on strike and thus paralyze its worldwide opera*755tions; does labor law compel them to return to work, lest they inflict “unreasonable” injury on businesses who rely on FedEx, or on the company’s other workers? Yet again the answer is no; this is the sort of leverage that unions have been exploiting, without legal hindrance, since the Wagner Act. Whether allowing this is good policy is for the political rather than the judicial branch of government to say. For transportation and a few other industries the political answer (in the Railway Labor Act and the Taft-Hartley Act) has been a process that drags out the negotiations, coupled with a power in the President to force temporary halt to strikes. Outside of these statutes there is no such remedy. Yet if Bob Evans is right, and it is “unreasonable” to exploit market power, these political accommodations were unnecessary; strikes at high season, or by craft unions, or at bottlenecks, have been unlawful all along. That would come as a shock to everyone involved.
Confining Bob Evans to a subset of all labor disputes — those growing out of conduct (or “misconduct,” as workers see it) by supervisors — is no more attractive. The identity of a supervisor ordinarily is not a mandatory subject of bargaining, and employees therefore may not strike in response to management’s choices. Trom-pler contended that this doctrine entitled it to fire the workers; the Board found, to the contrary, that the workers were protesting the leadman’s deeds, and top management’s failure to address protests about them, rather than the leadman’s identity. Another person who ran the shop in the same way would have been as objectionable to the striking workers. Substantial evidence supports that decision. Thus, contrary to my colleagues’ assertion, maj. op. at 751, this case has nothing to do with “concerted activity over supervisor selection.” Sex discrimination, the handling of drug issues, and training — the nub of the employees’ grievances — affect terms and conditions of employment. That supervisors influence these things does not convert disputes about them into demands that employers choose particular supervisors; if it did, then essentially all nonfinan-eial issues would be treated as complaints about the employers’ abilities to have the supervisors of their choice.
These six employees walked out because they were dissatisfied with the terms and conditions of their employment. The Board was entitled to hold that concerted refusals to work, until conditions improve, are protected by federal law, whether or not a third party such as an agency or judge thinks the stoppage reasonable in relation to the nature of the grievance and the cost the employer must bear. Resolving this dispute should have required nothing more than recognizing that the Board’s position (including its handling of any issues left open by Washington Aluminum) does not contradict a federal statute. To the extent Bob Evans holds otherwise, it is untenable.