National Labor Relations Board v. Denver Building & Construction Trades Council/Dissent Douglas

by William O. Douglas

United States Supreme Court

341 U.S. 675

National Labor Relations Board  v.  Denver Building & Construction Trades Council

 Argued: Feb. 27, 1951. --- Decided: June 4, 1951

Mr. Justice DOUGLAS, with whom Mr. Justice REED joins, dissenting.

The employment of union and nonunion men on the same job is a basic protest in trade union history. That was the protest here. The union was not out to destroy the contractor because of his antiunion attitude. The union was not pursuing the contractor to other jobs. All the union asked was that union men not be compelled to work alongside nonunion men on the same job. As Judge Rifkind stated in an analogous case, 'the union was not extending its activity to a front remote from the immediate dispute but to one intimately and indeed inextricably united to it.' ^[1]

The picketing would undoubtedly have been legal if there had been no subcontractor involved-if the general contractor had put nonunion men on the job. The presence of a subcontractor does not alter one whit the realities of the situation; the protest of the union is precisely the same. In each the union was trying to protect the job on which union men were employed. If that is forbidden, the Taft-Hartley Act makes the right to strike, guaranteed by § 13, dependent on fortuitous business arrangements that have no significance so far as the evils of the secondary boycott are concerned. I would give scope to both § 8(b)(4) and § 13 by reading the restrictions of § 8(b)(4) to reach the case where an industrial dispute spreads from the job to another front. ^[2]

Notes

1. Douds v. Metropolitan Federation, D.C., 75 F.Supp. 672, 677.
2. See the opinion of Judge Fahy below, 87 U.S.App.D.C. 293, 186 F.2d 326; and the dissenting opinion of Judge Clark, International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers v. National Labor Relations Board, 2 Cir., 181 F.2d 34, 40.