Dee Edwards, for petitioner. Frederic S. Glover, Jr., for
respondent.
Petition for writ of certiorari to the United States Court of
Appeals for the Sixth Circuit. Denied.
Dissenting opinion by Mr. Justice BLACK with whom the Chief
Justice concurs:
'I would grant certiorari in this
case. While petitioner presents other interesting and important
questions concerning the right of trial by jury under the Seventh
Amendment and concerning the power of a district court to grant
summary judgment, my opinion is addressed to the question of
whether the courts below were right in denying petitioner Simmons a
court trial of her claim that she had been wrongfully discharged
without 'just cause' in violation of the collective bargaining
agreement under which she was employed. The ground for refusing to
let her try her case was that her employer and her union had agreed
among themselves that her discharge was for 'just cause.' I think
the courts below were wrong. The material facts upon which I base
my conclusion are these:
'Petitioner was one of about a dozen
employees working at the lunch counter in respondent's restaurant
in a railway station. For about a year prior to petitioner's
discharge, profits at the lunch counter lagged behind those
expected by respondent. Respondent suspected that this was due
either to the mishandling or to the actual stealing of its funds or
goods. The collective bargaining agreement provided that no
employee should be discharged without 'just cause' and that
prospective discharges would be discussed by the employer and the
union. Pursuant to the contract, the company's representative went
to the union's representative to discuss what could be done in
order to improve the profit situation at the lunch counter. The
company representative suggested that all of the counter employees
be discharged and other take
Page 382 U.S.
884 , 885
their places. The union representative objected. After lengthy
negotiations, however, a plan was agreed upon by the company and
the union under which five of the employees would be immediately
laid off for a two- week period. If at the end of the period,
records indicated that there was a significant improvement in the
company's business at the lunch counter, it was agreed that the
five employees were to be discharged. The five were laid off
including the petitioner and Gladys Hildreth. [
Footnote 1] When the company convinced the union
that the lunch counter profits had increased during the period, the
union agreed with respondent that the workers should be discharged
permanently. Both petitioner and Miss Hildreth vigorously
protested. They urged the union to carry their protest all the way
up through the various stages of negotiations leading to
arbitration. The union representative, however, refused to give any
help to petitioner and Miss Hildreth. Then, petitioner, by herself,
took the matter up with the company, endeavoring to settle it as a
personal grievance of her own. The company refused to negotiate
with petitioner in any way whatever, notwithstanding 9(a) of the
National Labor Relations Act2 which states in part, 'That any
individual employee or a group of employees shall have the right at
any time to present grievances to their employer and to have such
grievances adjusted, without the intervention of the bargaining
representative, as long as the adjustment is not inconsistent with
the terms of a collective bargaining agreement then in effect.'
Petitioner, out of a job, then brought this action against the
company for the alleged breach of contract in discharging her.'
Page 382 U.S.
884 , 886
'Although this Court has gone very far in some of its cases with
reference to the power of a collective bargaining union to process
the personal grievances of its members, it has not yet gone so far
as to say that where there is a personal grievance for breach of a
collective bargaining agreement, the employee can be deprived of an
independent judicial determination of the claim by an agreement
between the union and the employer that no breach exists. But this
is exactly what was done to petitioner and Miss Hildreth. Though I
dissented in Republic Steel Corp. v. Maddox,
379 U.S. 650, I was, and
still am of the belief that the majority opinion purported to
preserve the right of an employee to sue his employer if his union
refused to press his grievances. However, I fear that the decisions
below in the Hildreth case and in this one go a long way toward
effectively destroying whatever redress this Court left the
individual employee in Maddox. The courts below refused to make
their own determination of whether Miss Hildreth's and petitioner's
discharges were made for 'just cause.' Instead they allowed the
employer's defense that 'just cause' was simply what the employer
and the union jointly wanted it to be. While we often say that
nothing is decided by a denial of certiorari, all of us know that a
denial of certiorari in this case, following the denial of
certiorari in the Hildreth case, will undoubtedly lead people to
believe, and I fear with cause, that this Court is now approving
such a forfeiture of contractual claims of individual
employees.
'This case points up with great
emphasis the kind of injustice that can occur to an individual
employee when the employer and the union have such power over the
employee's claim for breach of contract. Here no one has claimed
from the beginning to the end of the Hildreth lawsuit or this
lawsuit that either of these individuals was guilty of any kind of
misconduct justifying their discharges. Each was one of twelve
employees engaged in
Page 382 U.S.
884 , 887
the operation of a lunch counter. In the Hildreth case
respondent's supervisor testified that he had no knowledge that any
of the employees discharged were in any way responsible for the
lunch counter's unsuccessful operation. The manager of the lunch
counter stated that he did not know of 'one single thing' that Miss
Hildreth had done to reduce the counter's profits. We must assume
that had petitioner here been given an opportunity to try her case,
the same facts would have appeared. Moreover, petitioner alleges
that she was prepared to show that subsequent to her discharge, the
office girl who counted the money received at the lunch counter was
found to be embezzling those funds and was discharged for it. Miss
Hildreth had worked for respondent for nine and one-half years, and
petitioner for fifteen years, prior to their discharges. There is
no evidence that respondent had ever been dissatisfied with their
work before the company became disappointed with its lunch counter
about a year prior to the discharges. Yet both were discharged for
'just cause,' as determined not by a court but by an agreement of
the company and the union.
'I would not construe the National
Labor Relations Act as giving a union and an employer any such
power over workers. In this case there has been no bargain made on
behalf of all the workers represented by the union. Rather there
has been a sacrifice of the rights of a group of employees based on
the belief that some of them might possibly have been guilty of
some kind of misconduct that would reduce the employer's profits.
Fully recognizing the right of the collective bargaining
representative to make a contract on the part of the workers for
the future, I cannot believe that those who passed the Act intended
to give the union the right to negotiate away alleged breaches of a
contract claimed by individual employees.
'The plain fact is that petitioner
has lost her job, not because of any guilt on her part, but because
there is a
Page 382 U.S.
884 , 888
suspicion that some one of the group which was discharged was
guilty of misconduct. The sum total of what has been done here is
to abandon the fine, old American ideal that guilt is personal. Our
system of jurisprudence should not tolerate imposing on the
innocent, punishment that should be laid on the guilty. If the
construction of the labor law given by the courts below is to
stand, it should be clearly and unequivocally announced by this
Court so that Congress can, if it sees fit, consider this question
and protect the just claims of employees from the joint power of
employers and unions.'
Footnotes
Footnote 1 See Union News
Company v. Hildreth, 6 Cir.,
295 F.2d
658; Hildreth v. Union News Company, 6 Cir.,
315 F.2d
548, certiorari denied 375 U.S. 826.
Footnote 2 61 Stat. 143, 29
U.S.C. 159 (1964 ed.)