Judicial Restraint

While local and state governments and big business concentrated on stamping out unionism through violence and intimidation, the court system waged its war by denying workers the right to organize and the right to conduct activities to promote their interests. For example, the U.S. Supreme Court showed its feeling toward the granting of injunctions in Truax vs. Corrigan, tried in 1921. Arizona had passed a law similar to the Clayton Act; the state’s lower courts issued an injunction. The state Supreme Court declared the injunction illegal. But the U.S. Supreme Court ruled the Arizona court was wrong in denying the injunction, since such an action denied the right to resort to equity in a specific case, thus denying equal protection under the law.

In Duplex Printing Press us. Deering, the Clayton Act’s clause on immunity from antitrust laws was virtually nullified. After the Machinists Union called a strike in 1913 and told its members and those of other locals to refuse to install and service Duplex equipment, the company applied for an injunction. Duplex stated the union was an illegal combination trying to monopolize the machinists’ trade. The U.S. Supreme Court in 1921 reversed the lower courts’ denial of injunction, saying the act applied only to directly involved employers and employees, not to other persons-the involvement of other persons was an unlawful secondary boycott. Also, Section 6 of the act didn’t permit a labor organization to engage in an act causing “a normally lawful organization to become a cloak for an illegal combination in restraint of trade” or exempt a union or its members “from accountability where it or they depart from... normal and legitimate objects and engage in an actual combination or conspiracy in restraint of trade.”

The court provided definitions of lawful and legitimate in the Tri-City Trades case of 1921 and in Coronado Coal Company vs. UMWA in 1922. In the former situation the court declared all picketing was unlawful but that courts could allow it but limit it to “peaceful picketing”—one striker stationed at the plant’s entrance. In Coronado, striking labor unions affecting interstate commerce could be held liable for destruction of property or a property right. This latter decision threatened to choke off any type of labor activity.

In 1930, however, the Supreme Court astonished labor by implicitly sanctioning unionism. The case arose when the Brotherhood of Railway and Steamship Clerks obtained an injunction against the efforts of the Texas and New Orleans Railway Company to form a company union. The BRSC claimed the company union violated the Railway Labor Act, which granted each side the right to collective bargaining representation of their own choosing. The court’s decision approved the act's provision.