Unions may have to pay pricey state law damages rather than be covered by the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) if they intentionally destroy company property during a strike, the U.S. Supreme Court decided June 1.
Glacier Northwest, a building materials company in Seattle, sued its employees’ union, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, after workers started a strike when concrete was scheduled to be batched and delivered. The company claimed the striking workers intentionally sabotaged its business operations and property because they waited until the concrete was loaded into the trucks to strike. The union argued that the employer’s state-law claims were pre-empted under federal law.
“Far from taking reasonable precautions to mitigate foreseeable danger to Glacier’s property, the union executed the strike in a manner designed to compromise the safety of Glacier’s trucks and destroy its concrete. Such conduct is not arguably protected by the NLRA; on the contrary, it goes well beyond the NLRA’s protections,” the court wrote.
More analysis of this decision will be provided later today.