Nakedly Corrupt and Partisan

The Supreme Court in a nutshell.

The latest ruling, where the court ruled that an employer can sue a union for losses caused by a strike, (Glacier Northwest v. International Brotherhood of Teamsters) is yet another case of the conservative 6 on the Supreme court running roughshod over the law and precedent.

It should be noted that this case went 8-1, and that the ruling was by no means as expansive as it could have been, and how Alito and Thomas indicated it should have gone in their concurrences, but they are showing where this is eventually going:

Today’s US Supreme Court ruling in the Glacier Northwest v. International Brotherhood of Teamsters case was a blow to workers—but not quite the knockout punch hoped for by the Chamber of Commerce. Despite the court’s 8-1 decision favoring the employer, the justices made a relatively narrow ruling, rather than a broad one weakening the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) even further. In the future—the near future—labor will not be so lucky as to lose this lightly, and workers should get ready to fight what’s coming.

First, the good news, such as it is: Today’s decision leaves intact a long-held legal doctrine known as the Garmon preemption, and therefore keeps the NLRB as the decision-maker on what constitutes “reasonable precaution” in worker strikes. Cheerleaders for free enterprise were hoping to replace that long-established federal jurisdiction with state-level tort law. Those cheerleaders didn’t get all they wanted today.

The bad news—a harbinger of the future—is on full view in Justice Samuel Alito’s concurring opinion, where he makes clear that he is ready and willing to kill Garmon as soon as the court can get a better case with which to achieve this Chamber of Commerce objective. He’s joined by the other hard-core anti-labor ideologues on the court—Justices Thomas and Gorsuch—in a second concurring opinion, revealing their hands clearly so we can count: Three Justices are ready to totally eviscerate the NLRB as part of their determined campaign to gut the administrative state. Agency by agency, they’re progressing when they get the chance, as we saw this court do just last week to the Environmental Protection Agency, all but stripping it of any power at all to enforce the Clean Water Act.

This statement of motivations is incomplete, Alito and the rest of the conservatives on the court want to effectively outlaw labor unions in the United States.

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Glacier has its origin in a 2017 contract dispute between Teamsters Local 174 and five cement companies in the Seattle area, led by Glacier Northwest. Drivers whose trucks still had concrete in them when a strike began took what they assert was “reasonable precaution,” notifying management that they had left the trucks running so the drums would continue rotating and the concrete would not harden and destroy the trucks. Because the company failed to make any contingency plans around the strike, however, the concrete had to be offloaded and left to harden rather than delivered to customers. That should have been the end of it. But, nearly four months later, Glacier sued Local 174 in state court—not at the NLRB—alleging tortious damages from the destruction of concrete during the strike.

On its face, Glacier is about whether the Teamsters Union owes money to a Washington concrete company. But the real purpose of pushing this case was to upend nearly 100 years of legal precedent and congressional intent by stripping power from the NLRB, the federal agency charged with protecting workers’ rights to collective action at work.

It's clear to me that the court is setting the table to eviscerate union rights in the United States.

It's that the court wants to return to the Lochner Era, where any ability of the government to provide for the public good is suborned to a made up "Freedom of Contract".

Much like Roosevelt in the 1930s, we need to slap down this legislation from the bench.