"... the drivers drove their trucks back to the company’s headquarters and walked off the job. For those whose trucks had already been loaded with cement but who had not yet made deliveries, they left their trucks running so the cement wouldn’t instantly harden inside the trucks’ drums. The company, however, was unable to deliver the cement and some of it hardened, requiring it be destroyed and carted away. The strike lasted one week before the parties reached agreement on a new contract."
From "Cement-truck drivers went on strike/A lawsuit by their company may pave the way for restricting workers’ rights," the SCOTUSblog write-up of Glacier Northwest v. International Brotherhood of Teamsters, Local Union 174. Oral argument is this morning.
Glacier sued the Teamsters Union, which represents the drivers, for “tortious destruction” of the company’s property.... The Washington Supreme Court dismissed the case, finding that it wasn’t appropriate to apply state tort law to a labor dispute covered by a federal law, the National Labor Relations Act....
In San Diego Building Trades v. Garmon, the Supreme Court interpreted this preemptive effect broadly, holding that the NLRA precludes application of conflicting or even arguably conflicting state law in order to ensure that labor law applies uniformly to all workers, unions, and employers across the country.
The court has recognized only a narrow exception to the preemption doctrine. Specifically, the court has allowed application of state tort law only for torts “so deeply rooted in local feeling and responsibility that, in the absence of compelling congressional direction, we could not infer that Congress had deprived the States of the power to act.”
Glacier argues that "intentional property destruction" — sabotage — is a matter of "local feeling."
There's also an argument that if federal law does preempt state law, it's a taking within the meaning of the Fifth Amendment and the federal government owes just compensation. That's a constitutional question that can be avoided by interpreting the federal statute not to preempt the state law claim.
There is more complexity, explained at the link, but the bottom line, per SCOTUSblog, is:
The Supreme Court has long recognized how central the right to strike is in protecting workers’ bargaining power. If employers have more leeway to argue that a strike has caused economic damage for which the union can be held liable, that right will be weakened.
२९ टिप्पण्या:
They should ask the 'ban gas stoves' guy about this!
After all.. His father had a summer job as a coal miner.
"I'm saying if you strike a match and you put your finger in it, you're likely to get burned." He also said, "That doesn't mean I'm threatening to burn you. That just means if you strike the match, and you put your finger in it, common sense will tell you it'll burn your finger. Common sense will tell you that in these strikes.. a number of things happen. And a confrontation is one of the potentials that can happen. Do I want it to happen? Absolutely not. Do I think it can happen? Yes, I think it can happen.
is gilbar saying, that unions are organized crime? Yes, yes he is.
the "deeply rooted" loophole doesn't have enough concrete... whatever.
Interesting that SCOTUSBlog thinks that moderating NLRA preemption doctrine would only restrict workers' rights. Or, if that's not what they're thinking, it's at least what they're saying.
Similar to their take on Hobby Lobby, that somehow it was only to the benefit of corporate speech. Their constitutional analysis is transactional to the point of being boring.
If your actions cause damage to somebody not related to the economic harm directly related to the work stoppage, you owe compensation. That does not weaken your worker rights. Be more careful next time.
In all seriousness, here is a chance for the revisionist Robert's court to tell us where they stand on a long-time democratic party stalwart, and thorn on GOP side -the unions. To quote VP Biden "it's a big fucking deal".
This wasn't incidental damage and you can be sure the drivers of the full trucks knew what they were doing. Either the union should have called the strike earlier so no trucks were full or the truckers should have started with a slow-down so that all the trucks were empty.
This seems more like sabotage or vandalism than incidental or inevitable losses due to a strike. I don't see how holding the union liable undermines the right to strike.
The only excuse I can think of is if the strike were called at the last minute such that the drivers of the full trucks didn't know they wouldn't be making their deliveries at the time they filled the tanks.
So, if nurses went on strike and walked off the job, leaving patients to die, there wouldn't be any liability?
tim maguire @ 9:10: your comment makes perfect sense to me. They could have easily avoided this damage at no cost to themselves. Pay up.
I'll tell you a secret - if you pour a few pounds of sugar into a batch of mixed cement, it will never set up. So a prudent cement operator might just keep a few sacks around to give himself that option, if you know what I mean. And: If you let cement set up in the mixing machinery, it makes for big headaches - cutting the pipework with torches, dis-assembling the pumps, and so on. Takes a week to put it right, plus parts. Every so often - at least in the old days - cement operators would throw a small explosive charge into their mixing tanks to 'rattle' the dried excess cement off the steel - works like a champ.
So if nurses go on strike, they can walk out of surgery or the ICU, killing the patient, and there is no recourse under state law?
Specifically, the court has allowed application of state tort law only for torts “so deeply rooted in local feeling and responsibility that, in the absence of compelling congressional direction, we could not infer that Congress had deprived the States of the power to act.”
So, in other words, the threshold test is if it's capable of embarrassing Congress?
I'm in agreement with Tim Maguire. This is so much like Davies v. Mann, the last chance doctrine. I'm a union guy and currently a member of a union - I wouldn't act this way no matter how fed up I am.
The only excuse I can think of is if the strike were called at the last minute such that the drivers of the full trucks didn't know they wouldn't be making their deliveries at the time they filled the tanks.
If the company knew the "appointed hour for the onset of the strike", they could have foreseen that the deliveries couldn't be made in time and they would have known the union drivers would not, could not finish those deliveries without being in violation of the strike, which they would never do. They should have known the drivers would stop the trucks and get out at the appointed hour. Glacier could have called a halt to operations that day. They could have told the drivers not to fill the trucks or not to come to work that day...if they knew, which I presume they did.
long-time democratic party stalwart, and thorn on GOP side -the unions.
Why should that be though, going forward? Trump drew millions of union members (not the unions themselves) into voting Republican Party with America First and his focus on good jobs, a good economy and bringing our manufacturing jobs home. The Dems have abandoned the working class and the middle class. Why shouldn't the Republicans continue to try to keep and grow that blue collar constituency?
Specifically, the court has allowed application of state tort law only for torts “so deeply rooted in local feeling and responsibility that, in the absence of compelling congressional direction, we could not infer that Congress had deprived the States of the power to act.”
A presumption of ethical authority. The People lack standing, and "our Posterity", in the wake of Congressional mischief, are deprived of arms. Choice.
"Why should that be though, going forward? Trump drew millions of union members (not the unions themselves) into voting Republican Party with America First and his focus on good jobs, a good economy and bringing our manufacturing jobs home. The Dems have abandoned the working class and the middle class. Why shouldn't the Republicans continue to try to keep and grow that blue collar constituency?"
Empty promises aside, the Republicans are not doing anything more to benefit the blue collar constituency than the Democrats. (Trump didn't bring manufacturing back home.) The first thing either party must do, if they truly want to benefit that constituency, is to pass legislation increasing the minimum wage, starting somewhere between $15.00-$20.00 per hour, with built-in increases every year.
Blogger Robert Cook said..."Empty promises aside, the Republicans are not doing anything more to benefit the blue collar constituency than the Democrats. (Trump didn't bring manufacturing back home.) The first thing either party must do, if they truly want to benefit that constituency, is to pass legislation increasing the minimum wage, starting somewhere between $15.00-$20.00 per hour, with built-in increases every year."
The first thing that needs to be done is to stop illegal immigration, starting with securing the border.
The company, however, was unable to deliver the cement and some of it hardened, requiring it be destroyed and carted away.
So what happens to the truck when the cement hardens inside the tank? Does it also have to be thrown away? Or maybe just the tank?
Comrade Bob,
Rremember the Keystone pipeline? Good union and non union jobs. Two other things Trump did was lower the corporate tax rate and renegotiate NAFTA. What did the Democrats do? Oh Yeah. Fuck all that up.
Empty promises aside, the Republicans are not doing anything more to benefit the blue collar constituency than the Democrats.
Stupid not to, don't you think?
(Trump didn't bring manufacturing back home.)
That remains to be seen. Bringing manufacturing home is not something that could happen in 4 years. But he did totally change the conversation, which is how a sweeping change starts. I actually think it is happening. Companies are moving out of China. Not all Trump's doing, of course. China has become increasingly toxic for business in many ways. Also, more people are seeing the error of the US becoming dependent on China for critical goods like pharmaceuticals, tech, defense related products, girlfriends for Eric Swallwell, business partners for Hunter Biden, etc. But Trump deserves credit as well. He changed a lot of minds about what is possible and that there could be a general reversal on a decades long trend in manufacturing.
pass legislation increasing the minimum wage
I'm not opposed to higher minimum wages or higher wages for almost anyone. Having said that, I think raising the minimum wage is a short-term fix. Soon rising costs, driven by the artificially higher wage, result in higher prices and the minimum wage worker is back where he started. You wind up endlessly chasing another artificial hike. Politicians love it, though, for obvious reasons.
Minimum wage jobs pay better when labor demand goes up and workers have more options. We saw this happen dramatically under Trump. Seems like every time wages start to go up, R's and D's quickly get together to obey their big donor masters and work to suppress those wages one way or another.
Wages were going up under Trump and businesses were screaming for workers. Now we have a flood of illegals coming in, jacking up labor supply and inflation being created to push down demand.
Last time I checked Garmon preemption applied when the suit involves conduct that is actually or arguably an unfair labor practice under section 7 or 8 of the NLRA, because it was in the primary jurisdiction of the NLRB. It means the dispute is for the NLRB not that the plaintiffs automatically lose.
It’s tough to shoehorn this into a takings claim unless application of the Supremacy clause would also be a taking.
It's things like this that convince me that most American unions have rather more to do with organized crime than anything else.
"Awfully nice business you have here... Be sad if anything were to... Happen to it..."
Doing what those drivers did was tantamount to destroying those concrete trucks. Once the concrete sets up inside them, the entire tank has to be scrapped, along with a lot of other stuff on the truck. You want higher wages, that's not the way to go about doing it.
The Europeans do unions and professional associations a lot better than we do. Here in the US, such things are usually purely mercenary in action and intent, adversarial in the extreme. In Europe, the unions are more guild-like, and they'll look at the company as a shared resource rather than something to loot.
My one personal experience with German woodworking unions was... Educational. I got invited into the home of a guy who owned and operated a small woodworking plant that made furniture and caskets. Got to know them, a little bit, and while I was around them, there was an "incident". His sister had a son; boy was a bit of a POS. He hired the young man, and it wasn't very long before other employees caught him stealing from the company. They brought him up on an internal union tribunal, then found him guilty. They then blackballed that dummy from working in any allied woodworking trade facility where their union held sway; he was essentially unemployable anywhere in the industry because of that. His uncle, the owner? Had absolutely nothing to say in the matter; he couldn't have brought this guy back if he'd wanted to, and he had considerable family pressure to do so.
Template that on an American union... They'd have gone on strike to save that young man's job, never mind that he was stealing from the company. Totally different attitude than the European ones I've witnessed. Unions can be good, or they can be bad; it's all in how they're run. I don't like a lot of the crap I see like this incident outlined in this post. You don't get to destroy other people's property because you want more money from them.
Anyone who cannot see the benefits that were enjoyed by blue collar workers from the economic conditions prevailing while Trump was president has no wisdom to offer on the subject.
No Glacier trucks were damaged. The company was able to remove the wet concrete from the trucks before it cured. I'm sure they just took it somewhere nearby and dumped it out on the ground and later cleaned it up and hauled it away. Of course, they were unable to complete deliveries to waiting customers and the product was lost, so it was expensive.
I'm not a lawyer or anything despite starting law school and descending into politics, but I know for concrete, and that's pretty monumental property damage. And having to find fast replacements who can handle an abandoned full truck against the clock could be construed as endangering the public.
Or it ought to be. I'm proud to be a successful union decertifier.
That strike started about a week before we were ready to pour concrete into our foundation forms. Two months into the strike, we got concrete from a Snohomish County concrete plant that wasn't being struck. The name on the trucks were covered over and they were driven by scabs. Because of the long distance between our house and the plane, the trucks took a couple of hours to get a new concrete load so we could continue the pour.
The strike lasted about another two months after our pour. The strikers didn't get what they wanted and went back to work after a 4-month strike.
Glacier offloaded the concrete into its yard and bunkers, where it hardened and was disposed of. There were no unqualified drivers on the public roads.
No doubt the company has to deal with partial loads of excess concrete remaining in many of their trucks every day and have facilities and equipment for that purpose at their batch plant. There were 16 trucks with concrete in them, so it was certainly a heckuva lot more waste mud than they were normally handling, but apparently, they handled it.
It seems to me the drivers had a strong incentive for the trucks not to be damaged because they obviously wanted to return to driving them after the issues were hammered out and the strike lifted.
I don't think it counts as a simple strike if you do something to destroy company resources. I don't think disallowing such destruction is an offense against workers.
Takirks,
At NASA my father dealt with unionized aircraft mechanics. The issues I heard about were typically safety related, like using improper tools. He said the union reps were uniformly very unsympathetic to rule-breaking workers. Rules like, having an adjustable "Crescent" wrench on-site would get you sanctioned; USING one would get you fired.
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