The Supreme Court handed down an absolutely confounding decision on Thursday, which will encourage employers to bombard their workers’ unions with lawsuits if those workers go on strike. The Court’s decision in Glacier Northwest v. International Brotherhood of Teamsters waters down a rule intended to protect workers from duplicative lawsuits that can drain their union’s finances.
That said, Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s majority opinion does contain some language limiting the scope of this victory for employers. It was joined by liberal Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan. And archconservative Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito both wrote separate opinions calling for the Court to hand a more sweeping defeat to striking workers.
Only Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented, in an opinion that argued for maintaining longstanding protections for unions that have existed since the late 1950s.
In any event, Barrett’s Glacier Northwest opinion reads like it may be the product of a brokered compromise, where Sotomayor and Kagan agreed to sign on to an anti-union decision in order to prevent Thomas or Alito from assembling five votes for their more extreme positions.
That means unions are left with not the worst possible outcome — but still one that will significantly complicate their attempts to win fair contracts.
How this case should have been decided under preexisting law
Glacier Northwest involves unionized workers at a company that mixes and delivers concrete in its own fleet of mixing trucks. These workers allegedly timed their strike to begin after some of Glacier Northwest’s trucks were already filled with wet concrete, forcing the company’s non-union employees to race to dispose of the concrete before it hardened and did significant damage to the trucks.
Before Glacier Northwest, it was uncertain whether a union could time a strike in this way. On the one hand, one line of cases establishes that a union has a legal right to strike…
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