The Supreme Court will hear arguments Tuesday in a case that seeks to weaken the authority of the National Labor Relations Board, threatening to upend years of precedent for the ways in which workers go on strike.
Justices on the high court are slated to decide whether employers can sue unions accused of destroying property as part of a labor dispute in state court or whether such lawsuits are preempted by federal labor law. The NLRB is the entity that determines whether or not union conduct is protected under such laws.
The case, Glacier Northwest Inc. v. International Brotherhood of Teamsters, dates back to a 2017 labor dispute in which workers at a Seattle-based concrete company went on strike to protest contract negotiation delays.
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Glacier Northwest makes ready-mix concrete. When its drivers went on strike, they loaded their vehicles with cement, drove to the company headquarters, and walked off the job site with concrete mixing in the trucks.
The company argues it was unable to deliver the cement because there were no drivers and that some of the cement had already hardened, thus wanting the union to pay for damages and accusing it of “sabotage.”
Teamsters was accused by Glacier of starting the strike after loading the cement into the trucks because it would cost money to handle the undelivered cement. Glacier sued the NLRB for damages, but the union said that the company’s lawsuit was in retaliation for the strike.
Glacier believes if the Supreme Court fails to rule in its favor, then the federal government will have “taken” the value of its damaged concrete without compensation. But if the court decides the case in Glacier’s favor, union advocates worry it would unwind decades of federal labor law preemption precedent.
In the 1959 case San Diego Building Trades v. Garmon, the Supreme Court interpreted the preemptive effect broadly. The justices ruled that the National Labor Relations Act of 1935, the foundation statute of U.S. labor law, prevented the application of conflicting state law in order to ensure uniformity of labor rules throughout the country.
But the court has acknowledged a narrow exception to the preemption doctrine. That is, the allowance of applying 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.”
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The 6-3 Republican-appointed high court has, in recent years, taken a more extreme approach to union disputes, such as its 2018 ruling in Janus v. AFSCME by Justice Samuel Alito, which found it unconstitutional for public sector unions to charge “agency fees” for employees who decline to join the union but still benefit from the deals it bargains.
Still, the case has the potential to be decided under a more narrow ruling instead of a broader decision to disrupt the balance of power between employers and unions.
