The U.S. Supreme Court issued a decision Thursday siding with an employer that had sued a union for damages after workers went on strike.
In an 8-1 decision, the majority ruled that federal law does not preempt a lawsuit the employer filed against the union in state court, alleging workers had destroyed property with their work stoppage. The Supreme Court ruling strikes down a lower court’s decision and keeps the employer’s lawsuit against the union alive.
The dissent came from Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who wrote that the majority “eagerly insert[ed] itself into this conflict” rather than “modestly standing down” and that the ruling threatens to “erode the right to strike.”
The case centered on a 2017 dispute between Glacier Northwest, a ready-mix concrete company, and its unionized truck drivers who went on strike. Glacier Northwest accused the union of timing the walkout so that freshly mixed concrete would harden and be ruined — a claim that the union denied. The company filed a lawsuit in Washington state court seeking damages from the Teamsters related to the spoiled concrete.
The state’s Supreme Court had ruled that the workers’ strike was arguably protected by federal labor law and therefore the dispute should be handled by the National Labor Relations Board, a federal agency that referees such conflicts. Glacier Northwest appealed that decision and fought to have its claims against the union heard in state court.
In the majority’s opinion, Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote that the state Supreme Court had made a mistake by blocking the lawsuit. She said the union had failed to take “reasonable precautions” to make sure the concrete would not spoil.
“In this instance, the Union’s choice to call a strike after its drivers had loaded a large amount of wet concrete into Glacier’s delivery trucks strongly suggests that it failed to take reasonable precautions to avoid foreseeable, aggravated, and imminent harm to Glacier’s property,” Barrett wrote.
Because the union endangered the company’s property,” she added, federal labor law “does not arguably protect its conduct.
This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.