Republic Steel Corporation v. Maddox/Dissent Black

Mr. Justice BLACK, dissenting.

This is an ordinary, common, run-of-the-mill lawsuit for breach of contract brought by respondent Charlie Maddox, an iron miner employed by petitioner Republic Steel, to recover $694.08 of wages which he said the company owed him. This amount he said was due by the terms of a contract made between the company and the union representing workers at the mine at which Maddox worked, a contract which provided that if any employee should be discharged because the company 'permanently' closed the mine, he should continue to be paid the amount of his regular wages for a number of weeks after the discharge. The mine closed down, Maddox lost his job, but the company nevertheless refused to continue to pay him the wages he said it had obligated itself to pay under the contract. To collect the money he hired a lawyer and went to court. The trial court in Alabama awarded him the $694.08 (the stipulated amount due, if any) and the Supreme Court of the State affirmed. This Court now reverses. It holds that because the contract, agreed to by the union, provided for binding arbitration of all 'grievances,' federal law has deprived Maddox of his right to hire his own lawyer and to sue in a court of law for the balance of wages due, and has instead left him with only the remedies set out in the contract: a long, involved grievance procedure, controlled by the company and the union, followed by compulsory arbitration, with his claim put in the hands of union officials and union lawyers whether he wants them to handle it or not.

In thus deciding on its own, or deciding that Congress somehow has decided, to expand apparently without limit the kinds of claims subject to compulsory arbitration, to include even wage claims, and in thus depriving individual laborers of the right to handle their wage claims for themselves, today's decision of the Court interprets federal law in a way that is revolutionary. Yet the Court disposes of this case as easily as it would reach the conclusion that 2 plus 2 equal 4. First the Court says that the contract between the union and the company provides that a laborer who wants to assert a 'contract grievance' is bound to attempt to use the contract grievance procedure, which requires several stages of company-union meetings, negotiations, etc., to be followed by submitting the dispute for final decision to an arbitrator 'appointed by mutual agreement' of the union and the company. Next the Court labels Maddox' claim for wages due him a 'grievance'-and, indeed, no one would deny that Maddox was unhappy about the company's failure to pay him what it had promised. Finally the Court, citing as its authority § 301(a) of the Labor Management Relations Act, lays down for this and future cases the flat rule that no matter what his contractual claim-or 'grievance,' as the Court prefers to call it-an individual laborer, even though no longer an employee, has no choice but to follow the long, time-consuming, discouraging road to arbitration set out in the union-company contract, including having the union represent him whether he wants it to or not and whether or not he is still in its good graces. And of course the Court's logic leads irresistibly to the conclusion (although it has not yet had occasion to say so) that if instead of seeking wages due on discharge an employee wants to sue his employer for unpaid wages while he is still working, he cannot do that either, but must instead wait until the union processes his claim through the interminable stages of 'grievance procedure' and then turns him over to the arbitrator, whom he does not want. Employees are thus denied a judicial hearing and state courts have their ancient power to try simple breach-of-contract cases taken away from them taken away, not by Congress, I think, but by this Court. Today's holding is in my judgment completely unprecedented, and is the brainchild of this Court's recent consistently expressed preference for arbitration over litigation in all types of cases and for accommodating the wishes of employers and unions in all things over the desires of individual workers. Since I do not believe that Congress has passed any law which justifies any inference at all that workers are barred from bringing and courts from deciding cases like this one, and since I am not sure that it constitutionally could, it is impossible for me to concur in this decision.

I think one crucial flaw in the Court's logical presentation is that it treats things as the same which are in fact different. 'Grievance' is a word of many meanings in many contexts, and yet the Court uses it without any discrimination among them. As used in the industrial field 'grievance' generally signifies something that has happened that is unsatisfactory to employers or employees in connection with their work. Failure to settle serious and widespread grievances has sometimes brought about industrial tensions, strikes and violence, often disrupting the peace and doing irreparable harm to the economy of the Nation. In order to try to prevent such widespread disastrous results to the public, arbitration has come to be accepted as a good way to settle such semi-public controversies, which are more in the nature of power struggles between giants than ordinary justiciable controversies involving individual laborers. When a contract provided for arbitration to settle disputes which affected many workers and which could lead to strikes, this Court approved it and held that since both sides-company and union-had agreed to this method of peaceful settlement, federal law would honor and enforce it. Textile Workers Union of America v. Lincoln Mills, 353 U.S. 448, 77 S.Ct. 912, 1 L.Ed.2d 972. But to hold that the union and company can bind themselves to arbitrate a dispute of general importance affecting all or many of the union's members and vitally threatening the public welfare is a far cry from saying, as the Court does today, that an ordinary laborer whose employer discharges him and then fails to pay his past-due wages or wage substitutes must, if the union's contract with the employer provides for arbitration of grievances, have the doors of the courts of his country shut in his face to prevent his suing the employer to get his own wages for breach of contract. Lincoln Mills was a case involving a real and active collective bargaining dispute between union and employer over general working conditions; but the present case is a controversy not about general working conditions but about whether the company will pay one individual his wages.

For the individual, whether his case is settled by a professional arbitrator or tried by a jury can make a crucial difference. Arbitration differs from judicial proceedings in many ways: arbitration carries no right to a jury trial as guaranteed by the Seventh Amendment; arbitrators need not be instructed in the law; they are not bound by rules of evidence; they need not give reasons for their awards; witnesses need not be sworn; the record of proceedings need not be complete; and judicial review, it has been held, is extremely limited. To say that because the union chose a contract providing for grievance arbitration an individual employee freely and willingly chose this method of settling any contractural claims of his own which might later arise is surely a transparent and cruel fiction. And even if the employee could with any truth be regarded as having himself agreed to such a thing, until recently this Court refused to recognize and enforce contracts under which individuals were to be denied access to courts and instead left to the comparatively standardless process of arbitration. An insurance company cannot enforce a contract made with its insured to arbitrate all disputes which might arise in the future, this Court said, since such an agreement would be 'an attempt to oust the courts of jurisdiction by excluding the assured from all resort to them for his remedy.' Riddlesbarger v. Hartford Ins. Co., 7 Wall. 386, 391, 19 L.Ed. 257. Cf. Insurance Co. v. Morse, 20 Wall. 445, 22 L.Ed. 365. The Court holds today, however, that a union representing a worker in a mine or factory can by the union's contract take away from that worker his right to sue, which he would not be able to contract away himself unless the Riddlesbarger case is to be overruled. Compare Moseley v. Electronic & Missile Facilities, Inc., 374 U.S. 167, 172-173, 83 S.Ct. 1815, 1818, 10 L.Ed.2d 818 (concurring opinion). And there is nothing in the legislative history of § 301 which indicates any congressional purpose to overrule or avoid the Riddlesbarger rule. Moreover, there is not one word in § 301 about agreements to arbitrate. It is true that this Court said in Lincoln Mills, 'Painly the agreement to arbitrate grievance disputes is the quid pro quo for an agreement not to strike,' and 'the entire tenor of the history indicates that the agreement to arbitrate grievance disputes was considered as quid pro quo of a no-strike agreement.' In that case, however, the Court expressly recognized that its decision and reasoning did 'not reach' the right of individual employees to bring suit in court on their individual claims. Forcing Charlie Maddox, who is out of a job, to submit his claim to arbitration is not going to promote industrial peace. Charlie Maddox is not threatening to go out in the street by himself and stage a strike against the Republic Steel Corporation to get his unpaid wages. Merely because this Court in Lincoln Mills has expressed its preference for arbitration when used to avoid industrial warfare by heading off violent clashes between powerful employers and powerful unions. it does not follow that § 301 should be expanded to require a worker to arbitrate his wage claim or to surrender his right to bring his own suit to enforce that claim in court. Such an expansion would run counter to this Court's long-established policy of preserving the ancient, treasured right to judicial trials in independent courts according to due process of law.

The past decisions of this Court which are closest to the case before us are not Lincoln Mills and cases like it, which involved broad conflicts between unions and employers with reference to contractual terms vital to settlement of genuine employer-union disputes. The cases really in point are those which involved agreements governed by the Railway Labor Act and which expressly refused to hold that a discharged worker must pursue collective bargaining grievance procedures before suing in a court for wrongful discharge. Transcontinental & Western Air, Inc. v. Koppal, 345 U.S. 653, 73 S.Ct. 906, 97 L.Ed. 1325; Moore v. Illinois Central R. Co., 312 U.S. 630, 61 S.Ct. 754, 85 L.Ed. 1089. While those were wrongful-discharge cases and the suit here is for wages due on a contract after discharge, the principle of those cases is precisely applicable here, since as was pointed out in Slocum v. Delaware, L. & W.R. Co., 339 U.S. 239, 244, 70 S.Ct. 577, 579, 94 L.Ed. 795, the claim of a person no longer employed will almost never involve questions substantially affecting future relations between an employer and the remaining employees. The Court recognizes the relevance of Moore and Koppal and, while declining expressly to overrule them in this case, has raised the overruling axe so high that its falling is just about as certain as the changing of the seasons. Yet although members of Congress and alert counsel for the national unions and employers and bound to have been familiar with Moore at the time the comprehensive labor statute of which § 301 is a part was enacted, Congress did not see fit to disown the Moore rule and did not express a preference for a different policy with reference to individual suits on collective bargaining agreements covered by the LMRA.

The Court's opinion manifests great concern for the interests of employers and unions, but not, I fear, enough understanding and appreciation for an individual worker caught in the plight Maddox is in. The Court refers with seeming approval to the "common law' of the plant,' and directs attention to the clear interest that the union has in handling employees' grievances in order to 'enhance the union's prestige with employees.' It also refers to the great interest that an employer has (and I agree) in having a complicated procedural system which dissatisfied employees are here compelled to follow, which ends up in binding arbitration and which relieves the employer of a lawsuit. The Court then expresses its view that allowing this former employee to sue without going through the grievance procedure and arbitration, as he would be permitted to do in this case by the law of his State, has 'little to commend it' and 'would deprive employer and union of the ability to establish a uniform and exclusive method for orderly settlement of employee grievances.' I emphasize the words 'employer' and 'union' to point out that here, as elsewhere in the opinion, theirs seem to be the chief interests on which the Court's attention is focused. The procedure they (employer and union) want must be 'made exclusive,' or else they might not like it. Individual workers are to take some comfort, I suppose, in the Court's statement that 'it cannot be said, in the normal situation, that contract grievance procedures are inadequate to protect the interests of an aggrieved employee until the employee has attempted to implement the procedures and found them so.' I think it can be said, however, and I say it. I think an employee is just as capable of trying to enforce payment of his wages or wage substitutes under a collective bargaining agreement as his union, and he certainly is more interested in this effort than any union would likely be. This is particularly true where the employee has lost his job and is most likely outside the union door looking in instead of on hand to push for his claim. Examples certainly have not been wanting from which the Court might learn that often employees for one reason or another have felt themselves compelled to sue the union as a prerequisite to obtaining any help from the union at all. See, e.g., Humphrey v. Moore, 375 U.S. 335, 84 S.Ct. 363, 11 L.Ed.2d 370; Syres v. Oil Workers International Union, 350 U.S. 892, 76 S.Ct. 152, 100 L.Ed. 785; Brotherhood of R. Trainmen v. Howard, 343 U.S. 768, 72 S.Ct. 1022, 96 L.Ed. 699; Tunstall v. Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen & Enginemen, 323 U.S. 210, 65 S.Ct. 235, 89 L.Ed. 187; Steele v. Louisville & N.R. Co., 323 U.S. 192, 65 S.Ct. 226, 89 L.Ed. 173. But, says the Court, the employee attempting to recover wages owed him must, unless the collective bargaining contract of the company and the union provides otherwise, 'afford the union the opportunity to act on his behalf.' The Court then implies that if the union 'refuses to press or only perfunctorily presses the individual's claim,' there may be some form of redress available to the worker, but we are left in the dark as to what form that redress might take. It may be that the worker would be allowed to sue after he had presented his claim to the union and after he had suffered the inevitable discouragement and delay which necessarily accompanies the union's refusal to press his claim. But I cannot agree that this is the sort of remedy a worker should have to invoke to bring a simple lawsuit.

I am wholly unable to read § 301 as laying any such restrictive burdens on an employee. And I think the difference between my Brethren and me in this case, is not simply one concerning this Court's function in interpreting or formulating laws. There is also, apparently a vast difference between their philosophy and mine concerning litigation and the role of courts in our country. At least since Magna Carta people have desired to have a system of courts with set rules of procedure of their own and with certain institutional assurances of fair and unbiased resolution of controversies. It was in Magna Carta, the English Bill of Rights, and other such charters of liberty, that there originally was expressed in the English-speaking world a deep desire of people to be able to settle differences according to standard, well-known procedures in courts presided over by independent judges with jurors taken from the public. Because of these deepseated desires, the right to sue and be sued in courts according to the 'law of the land,' known later as 'due process of law,' became recognized. That right was written into the Bill of Rights of our Constitution and in the constitutions of the States. See Chambers v. State of Florida, 309 U.S. 227, 235-238, 60 S.Ct. 472, 476-477, 84 L.Ed. 716. Even if it be true, which I do not concede, that Congress could force a man in this country to have his ordinary lawsuit adjudicated not under due process of law, i.e., without the constitutional safeguards of a court trial, I do not think that this Court should ever feel free to infer or imply that Congress has taken such a step until the words of the statute are written so clearly that no one who reads them can doubt. Cf. United States ex rel. Toth v. Quarles, 350 U.S. 11, 76 S.Ct. 1, 100 L.Ed. 8; United States v. Lovett, 328 U.S. 303, 66 S.Ct. 1073, 90 L.Ed. 1252; Duncan v. Kahanamoku, 327 U.S. 304, 66 S.Ct. 606, 90 L.Ed. 688; Reid v. Covert, 354 U.S. 1, 5-10, 77 S.Ct. 1222, 1224-1227, 1 L.Ed.2d 1148 (opinion announcing judgment); Barsky v. Board of Regents, 347 U.S. 442, 456, 74 S.Ct. 650, 658, 98 L.Ed. 829 (dissenting opinion); Stein v. New York, 346 U.S. 156, 197, 73 S.Ct. 1077, 1099, 97 L.Ed. 1522 (dissenting opinion); Shaughnessy v. United States ex rel. Mezei, 345 U.S. 206, 216, 73 S.Ct. 625, 631, 97 L.Ed. 956 (dissenting opinion); Galloway v. United States, 319 U.S. 372, 396, 63 S.Ct. 1077, 1090, 87 L.Ed. 1458 (dissenting opinion). Maddox has a justiciable controversy. He has not agreed since the controversy arose, or even for that matter before it arose, to arbitrate it, and so he should not have the doors of the courts shut in his face. Nor do I believe that he or any other member of the union should be treated as an incompetent unable to pursue his own simple breach-of-contract losses. I cannot and do not believe any law Congress has passed provides that when a man becomes a member of a labor union in this country he thereby has somehow surrendered his own freedom and liberty to conduct his own lawsuit for wages. Of course this is not the worst kind of servitude to which a man could be subjected, but it is certainly contrary to the spirit of freedom in this country to infer from the blue that workers lose their rights to appeal to the courts for redress when they believe they are mistreated. Compare Smith v. Evening News Assn., 371 U.S. 195, 204-205, 83 S.Ct. 267, 272, 9 L.Ed.2d 246 (dissenting opinion).

I would affirm.