U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson was the lone dissenter in a decision by the high court Thursday, in which eight justices ruled that the National Labor Relations Act does not protect a union from liability from damages stemming from a workers strike.
The Supreme Court ruled that Glacier Northwest Inc., a concrete company, could revive its lawsuit against the Teamsters over a 2017 strike during which workers walked off the job, leaving wet concrete in the company's trucks. The company had sued the union, accusing the striking workers of sabotaging its product, but the Washington state supreme court had dismissed the lawsuit and said the National Labor Relations Board should decide it. The U.S. Supreme Court decided late last year to hear the appeal by Glacier.
Labor unions and experts say the high court's decision is a blow to U.S. workers' rights and could discourage future strikes during a time when labor organizing is seeing an uptick.
"The protections to the right to strike under the NLRA are already weak by comparison with most other democratic countries, but the court has weakened them even further," said John Logan, a professor and director of Labor and Employment Studies at San Francisco State University, on Thursday.
"It's another decision by the Supreme Court that undermines fundamental labor rights - exposes unions to potentially crippling lawsuits - at the very time when we should be strengthening those rights," Logan added. The majority conservative court has issued labor-related decisions in recent years that have been favorable to employers, including upholding arbitration contracts that bar class-action lawsuits by employees.
In a statement Thursday, Teamsters General President Sean O'Brien said the justices were "corruptible" and said they threw out nearly 100 years of legal precedent related to workers' ability to strike. "It's no coincidence that this ruling is coming at a time when workers across the country are fed up and exercising their rights more and more," O'Brien said.
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Yet William Gould, a former NLRB chairman and professor emeritus at Stanford University, said Thursday that the ruling was not as bad for workers as he had thought it would be.
"The ruling, while allowing for suits in state court, emphasizes the peculiar facts of this case and appears to continue to protect strikes which are timed to harm the employer," Gould said. "No strike is worth its salt if it can't be timed to hurt the employer."
In her dissent, Brown Jackson agreed with her fellow Supreme Court justices that workers' ability to strike is not "unlimited," but said that the circumstances of the case show that "the union's conduct was at least arguably protected" by the NLRA.
"Glacier is a concrete delivery company whose drivers are responsible for delivering wet concrete, so it is unremarkable that the drivers struck at a time when there was concrete in the trucks," Brown Jackson wrote. That's in contrast to the majority opinion, written by Justice Amy Coney Barrett, that "the drivers engaged in a sudden cessation of work that put Glacier's property in foreseeable and imminent danger."
Glacier did not immediately return MarketWatch's request for comment.
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