It will now be easier for companies to sue their employees for striking after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled Thursday morning in favor of allowing Seattle’s Glacier Northwest to move forward with a lawsuit against its workers’ union over strike-related losses.
The case stems from a 2017 strike in which Glacier’s truck drivers, represented by a local chapter of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, refused to deliver freshly mixed concrete following the expiration of a collective bargaining agreement between Glacier and the union.
The 8-1 decision, spearheaded by Justice Amy Coney Barrett, argues that the right to strike as enshrined by the National Labor Relations Act is “not absolute” – and that the union failed to take “reasonable precautions” to protect the company’s materials from “foreseeable, aggravated, and imminent danger.” Essentially, the blame falls on the union for organizing a strike while knowingly working with a material as perishable as wet cement.
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, the sole dissenting judge on the case, said that the Supreme Court is overstepping its boundaries by meddling in a case that should have been disputed through the National Labor Relations Board first.
“What Glacier seeks to do here is to shift the duty of protecting an employer’s property from damage or loss incident to a strike onto the striking workers, beyond what the Board has already permitted via the reasonable-precautions principle,” she wrote. “In my view, doing that places a significant burden on the employees’ exercise of their statutory right to strike …”
Teamsters General President Sean M. O’Brien issued a statement Thursday, calling the Supreme Court “political hacks” who “should be ashamed of themselves for throwing out long-standing precedent and legislating from the bench.”
The Martin Luther King, Jr. County Labor Council, a central body representing labor unions in King County, also expressed its disappointment in the ruling – but remained hopeful that the NLRB “will find Teamsters Local 174’s strike in this case was protected based on the actual facts, not just Glacier’s allegations.”
The Washington State Supreme Court had previously sided with the Teamsters, ruling that damage from striking was incidental to federally protected labor actions.