RAILWAY EMPLOYES’ DEPARTMENT, AMERICAN FEDERATION OF LABOR, ET AL. v. HANSON ET AL.
No. 451
Supreme Court of the United States
May 21, 1956
351 U.S. 225
Argued May 2, 1956.
Edson Smith argued the cause and filed a brief for Hanson et al., appellees.
By special leave of Court, Robert A. Nelson, Assistant Attorney General, argued the cause for the State of Nebraska, as amicus curiae. With him on the brief was Clarence S. Beck, Attorney General, for the State of Nebraska, Richard W. Ervin, Attorney General, for the State of Florida, and Joe T. Patterson, Attorney General, for the State of Mississippi. William B. Rodman, Jr., Attorney General, also joined in the brief for the State of North Carolina.
Briefs of amici curiae urging affirmance were filed for the States of South Dakota, by Phil Saunders, Attorney General; Texas, by John Ben Shepperd, Attorney General, joined by Eugene Cook, Attorney General, and E. Freeman Leverett and Robert H. Hall, Assistant Attorneys General, for the State of Georgia; Utah, by E. R. Callister, Attorney General, and Raymond W. Gee, Assistant Attorney General; South Carolina, by T. C. Callison, Attorney General; Virginia, by J. Lindsay Almond, Jr., Attorney General; and also by Allen A. Lauterbach for the American Farm Bureau Federation; E. Smythe Gambrell, W. Glen Harlan and Whiteford S. Blakeney for Bradford et al.; William B. Barton and
Briefs of amici curiae urging reversal were filed by J. Albert Woll and Thomas E. Harris for the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations, and Clarence M. Mulholland and Edward J. Hickey, Jr. for the Railway Labor Executives’ Association.
MR. JUSTICE DOUGLAS delivered the opinion of the Court.
This is a suit brought in the Nebraska courts by employees of the Union Pacific Railroad Co. against that company and labor organizations representing various groups of employees of the railroad to enjoin the application and enforcement of a union shop agreement entered into between the railroad company and the labor organizations. Plaintiffs are not members of any of the defendant labor organizations and desire not to join. Under the terms of the union shop agreement all employees of the railroad, as a condition of their continued employment, must become members of the specified union within 60 days and thereafter maintain that membership. It is alleged that failure on their part to join the union will mean the loss of their employment together with seniority, retirement, pension, and other rights.
“No person shall be denied employment because of membership in or affiliation with, or resignation or expulsion from a labor organization or because of refusal to join or affiliate with a labor organization; nor shall any individual or corporation or association of any kind enter into any contract, written or oral, to exclude persons from employment because of membership in or nonmembership in a labor organization.”
They ask for an injunction restraining the railroad company from enforcing and applying the union shop agreement.
The answers deny that the Nebraska Constitution and laws control and allege that the union shop agreement is authorized by
The union shop provision of the Railway Labor Act is only permissive. Congress has not compelled nor required carriers and employees to enter into union shop agreements. The Supreme Court of Nebraska nevertheless took the view that justiciable questions under the First and Fifth Amendments were presented since Congress, by the union shop provision of the Railway Labor
As already noted, the 1951 amendment, permitting the negotiation of union shop agreements, expressly allows those agreements notwithstanding any law “of any State.”
In the absence of conflicting federal legislation, there can be no doubt that it is within the police power of a State to prohibit the union or the closed shop. We so held in Lincoln Union v. Northwestern Co., 335 U. S. 525, and in American Federation of Labor v. American Sash Co., 335 U. S. 538, against the challenge that local “right to work” laws, including Nebraska‘s, violated the requirements of due process. But the power of Congress to regulate labor relations in interstate industries is likewise well-established. Congress has authority to adopt all appropriate measures to “facilitate the amicable settlement of disputes which threaten the service of the necessary agencies of interstate transportation.” Texas & N. O. R. Co. v. Railway Clerks, 281 U. S. 548, 570. These measures include provisions that will encourage the settlement of disputes “by inducing collective bargaining with the true representative of the employees and by preventing such bargaining with any who do not represent them” (Virginian R. Co. v. Federation, 300 U. S. 515, 548), and that will protect the employees against discrimination or coercion which would interfere with the free exercise of their right to self-organization and representation. Labor Board v. Jones & Laughlin, 301 U. S. 1, 33. Industrial peace along the arteries of commerce is a legitimate objective; and Congress has great latitude in choosing the methods by which it is to be obtained.
The choice by the Congress of the union shop as a stabilizing force seems to us to be an allowable one. Much might be said pro and con if the policy issue were before us. Powerful arguments have been made here that the long-run interests of labor would be better served by the development of democratic traditions in trade unionism without the coercive element of the union or the closed shop. Mr. Justice Brandeis, who had wide experience in labor-management relations prior to his appointment to
It is said that the right to work, which the Court has frequently included in the concept of “liberty” within the meaning of the Due Process Clauses (see Truax v. Raich, 239 U. S. 33; Takahashi v. Fish & Game Commission, 334 U. S. 410), may not be denied by the Congress. The question remains, however, whether the long-range interests of workers would be better served by one type of
On the present record, there is no more an infringement or impairment of First Amendment rights than there would be in the case of a lawyer who by state law is required to be a member of an integrated bar. It is argued that compulsory membership will be used to impair freedom of expression. But that problem is not presented by this record. Congress endeavored to safeguard against that possibility by making explicit that no conditions to membership may be imposed except as respects “periodic dues, initiation fees, and assessments.” If other conditions are in fact imposed, or if the exaction of dues, initiation fees, or assessments is used as a cover for forcing ideological conformity or other action in contravention of the First Amendment, this judgment will not prejudice the decision in that case. For we pass narrowly on
Reversed.
The provision of law now challenged is the latest exercise by Congress of its power under the Commerce Clause to promote peaceful industrial relations in the functioning of interstate railroads and thereby to further the national well-being. A mere recital of the course of history in this important field goes a long way to indicate that the main point of attack against the
The course of legislation affecting industrial controversies on railroads flows through these statutes: the
Nearly fifty years ago, the railroads successfully attacked the constitutionality of a vital feature of the
The change in the Court‘s understanding of industrial problems, certainly as they affect railroads, in their bearing upon the country‘s commerce and all that thereby hangs, to no small degree reflected the changed attitude of the railroads towards the rôle of railroad labor unions in the discharge of the functions of railroads. As striking evidence as any of this important shift in opinion is the fact that the Railway Labor Act of 1926 came on the statute books through agreement between the railroads and the railroad unions on the need for such legislation. It is accurate to say that the railroads and the railroad unions between them wrote the Railway Labor Act of 1926 and Congress formally enacted their agreement. I doubt whether there is another instance in the history of important legislation in which acknowledgment was so candidly made by a President of the United States that agreement reached between industrial disputants regarding legislation appropriate for securing their peaceful relations should become law. “I am informed,” the President reported to Congress in his annual message of December 8, 1925, “that the railroad managers and their employees have reached a substantial agreement as to what legislation is necessary to regulate and improve their relationship. Whenever they bring for-
We have come full circle from the point of view in the Adair case. There the railroads, to repeat, successfully resisted an Act of Congress which outlawed what colloquially became known as the “yellow-dog contract.” We are now asked to declare it beyond the power of Congress to authorize railroads to enter into voluntary agreements with the unions to which the overwhelming proportion of railway employees belong whereby all their workers are required to belong to such unions, provided, of course, that the unions be open unions, i. e., that membership in the unions be available on ordinary, appropriate terms. It seems to me that the constitutional objections to this legislation were conclusively and compendiously answered by Mr. Justice Holmes in his dissent in Adair v. United States, supra:
“Where there is, or generally is believed to be, an important ground of public policy for restraint the Constitution does not forbid it, whether this court agrees or disagrees with the policy pursued. It cannot be doubted that to prevent strikes, and, so far as possible, to foster its scheme of arbitration, might be deemed by Congress an important point of policy, and I think it impossible to say that Congress might not reasonably think that the provision in question would help a good deal to carry its policy along. But suppose the only effect really were to tend to bring about the complete unionizing of such railroad laborers as Congress can deal with, I think that object alone would justify the act. I quite agree that the question what and how much good labor unions do, is one on which intelligent people may
differ,—I think that laboring men sometimes attribute to them advantages, as many attribute to combinations of capital disadvantages, that really are due to economic conditions of a far wider and deeper kind—but I could not pronounce it unwarranted if Congress should decide that to foster a strong union was for the best interest, not only of the men, but of the railroads and the country at large.” 208 U. S., at 191–192.
The Court has put to one side situations not now before us for which the protection of the First Amendment was earnestly urged at the bar. I, too, leave them to one side.
