Industrial Accidents and Workers' Compensation

Workers' compensation statutes were the final area of protective legislation treated by the courts. By 1910 some six states had passed some form of compulsory workers' compensation. These laws established government-operated workers' compensation

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insurance pools that required employers either to subscribe to the public plan or to provide comparable private insurance coverage. Employers were immune from liability for those accidents covered under the plans.

The initial response to these measures was harshly critical. In the most famous case, Ives v. South Buffalo Ry. Co. ( 1911), the New York Court of Appeals overturned that state's workers' compensation statute, denying that the police powers of the states permitted such legislation. Progressive reformers denounced the decision, and the business community, now persuaded of the value of the legislation, protested lustily as well, going so far as to urge Congress to pass a federal compensation statute.

The Ives decision, however, was an isolated event. A few months later the Washington Supreme Court upheld a statute nearly identical to the one overturned in Ives. The supreme courts of Wisconsin, Massachusetts, Montana, and Ohio quickly ratified additional legislation. Even in Texas ( 1915), where part of a plan was held invalid, the judges of the Court of Civil Appeals, did not deny the state legislature's authority to pass it. In 1915, the New York Court of Appeals, following the passage of an amendment to the state constitution by an angry electorate, upheld a law virtually identical to that struck down in Ives.

The U.S. Supreme Court in 1917 added its support. The high court in 1908 had invalidated the first Federal Employer Liability Act as overly broad, then four years later resoundingly approved a revised measure. The justices, moreover, accepted arguments made by the states that they had sufficient authority under the police powers to pass compensation acts. In three separate cases, the Court in 1917 sustained state laws and rejected arguments made against them based on freedom to contract and substantive due-process doctrines.

Unions and the Courts

Judge Lemuel Shaws' opinion in Commonwealth v. Hunt ( Massachusetts, 1842) held that labor unions were not criminal conspiracies, but most courts continued to cast a jaundiced eye on unions and their major activities of picketing, striking, and boycotting. Unions became associated with radicalism (even anarchism), and courts tended to treat them as ongoing threats to public order, even when legislatures recognized them as legitimate.

The judiciary applied two important legal tools against organized labor. First, courts consistently invoked liberty to contract in striking down legislation supportive of unions. For example, Judge Magruder of Illinois declared unconstitutional a law that required contractors on public-works projects to hire only laborers belonging to unions. The U.S. Supreme Court added its voice. In Adair v. United States ( 1908), the justices overturned the Erdman Act, which declared illegal "yellow dog" contracts (in which employees promised as a condition of employment not to join a union) on railroads. In Coppage v. Kansas ( 1915) the justices invalidated a similar state law, with Justice Mahlon Pitney declaring that "there must and will be inequalities of fortune. [I]t is from the nature of things impossible to uphold freedom of contract and the right of private property without at the same time recognizing as legitimate those inequalities." ⁵²

The injunction was the second device employed by the courts to limit union power. An injunction is an order by a court to some person to stop them from doing

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something. Injunctions operate on persons and not things, and the injunction can be issued quickly and, because it is an equitable instead of a legal remedy, without a jury trial. Union members who failed to obey an injunction to cease picketing or other activities were subject to summary punishment, including imprisonment, for acting in contempt of court.

The first labor injunction was probably issued in 1880 by a New York court against strikers at the Johnston Harvester Company. Thereafter, the cases "grew in volume like a rolling snowball." ⁵³ The most celebrated labor injunction case involved Eugene V. Debs, president of the American Railway Union, and the leader of the great Pullman strike of 1894. Debs refused to heed an injunction issued by federal District Court Judge Peter Grosscup of Illinois to desist from obstructing the nation's railroads. The bloody rioting surrounding the strike only subsided when federal troops took charge of the railroad yards in Chicago. Debs went to jail for six months, and the Supreme Court, in In Re Debs ( 1895), affirmed Grosscup's contempt action, making Debs a martyr to the cause of labor and fomenting great agitation within the organized labor movement against the federal judiciary.

Some states attempted to pull the teeth of the injunctive power by passing legislation prohibiting its use. A 1915 Massachusetts statute, which the American Federation of Labor considered a "model labor law," provided that a person's labor should be construed as a personal rather than a property right and that no injunction should issue in labor matters. ⁵⁴ The Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts in Bogni v. Perotti ( 1916) invalidated the law, relying on liberty to contract to do so. "The right to make contracts to earn money by labor," the judges declared, "is at least as essential to the laborer as is any property right to other members of society." ⁵⁵

Federal judges also invoked injunctive authority under the guise of the Sherman Act, which they applied to unions as well as corporations. Judge Edward C. Billings, of the federal District Court of Louisiana, in United States v. Workingmen's Amalgamated Council of New Orleans ( 1893), was the first judge to grant a labor injunction under the Sherman Act. Although the Sherman Act nowhere mentioned labor unions, Billings inferred, probably correctly, that its framers had intended for it to include labor. Other federal judges extended Billings's approach, and the Supreme Court held in Lowe v. Lawlor ( 1908) that secondary boycotts (in which a union blocked the sale of goods to nonunion members) was an illegal restraint of trade. Although the major Progressive antitrust law, the Clayton Act ( 1914), specifically limited the use of injunctions against labor and provided for trial by jury in contempt proceedings, subsequent judicial rulings weakened its authority.

Date: 2015-01-29; view: 687