Court Limits Cities Seeking to Sue Over Illegal Strikes

The state Supreme Court, limiting the ability of cities to combat public employee strikes, ruled Monday that a municipality may not sue a union to recover financial losses resulting from an illegal strike.

The court said that while a public employer could still sue for breach of an explicit, no-strike clause or for violent or other wrongful acts committed during a strike, an illegal strike in itself is not grounds for recovering damages from a striking union in the absence of a law authorizing such recovery.

The justices, by a vote of 6 to 1, overturned a $5.4-million damage award won by San Francisco against a union that in 1976 had participated in a 39-day strike by building trades workers that later was declared illegal.

The ruling followed a controversial decision last year in which the justices sharply limited the definition of an illegal strike. Overturning a 25-year-old legal doctrine, they held that public employees have the right to strike except when it presents “imminent threat” to public health or safety.

Setback for Cities

Monday’s decision, while apparently not as far-reaching as the 1985 ruling, still represented another significant setback for California municipalities. Damage awards for public employee strikes are not often obtained--but the threat of such actions had proved useful to cities facing strikes, according to attorneys in the case.

In the ruling, the justices disapproved a 9-year-old state appellate court decision, rendered in a separate case, that they said was the only one in the nation to uphold a damage award for an illegal strike when that award was not specifically authorized by state statute.

There is “steadily growing recognition that judicial intervention to weight the bargaining balance in favor of public employers, by threatening to impose ruinous judgments on unions, is not a desirable or workable method of dealing with public employee strikes,” Justice Allen E. Broussard wrote for the majority.

“The selection of remedies for an illegal strike is, we believe, a matter for the Legislature and, in the absence of legislative authorization, courts should not . . . create a right to sue for damages,” he said.

Broussard’s opinion was joined by Chief Justice Rose Elizabeth Bird and Justices Stanley Mosk, Cruz Reynoso, Edward A. Panelli and Appellate Justice Sidney Feinberg, sitting temporarily by designation.

In dissent, Justice Malcolm M. Lucas said that public employee strikes “can result in a devastating financial injury to the affected municipality.”

To deny public employers such a right to sue “is not only unsound and shortsighted, but also constitutes unprecedented discrimination against California municipalities,” Lucas wrote.

Attorneys for the city denounced the ruling. “It’s fair to say that the court no longer looks with disfavor on public employee strikes,” said Steven A. Diaz, a private attorney representing the city. “This decision, combined with last year’s ruling, gives a massive new tool to labor’s side in these disputes.”

Chief Deputy City Atty. Philip S. Ward noted that injunctions ordering striking workers back on the job under threat of fines or jail terms have proven “largely ineffective.”

Attorneys for the union in the case were reported out of town and not immediately available for comment.

San Francisco had filed the suit against several building trades union in the wake of a ruling by a Superior Court judge that the strike in 1976 was illegal.

The city sought damages against the unions to compensate for the loss of revenue from the shutdown of the municipal transit system, the added costs of overtime for non-striking employees, and other financial losses attributable to the strike.

All but one of the unions agreed to a settlement in which they were dismissed from the suit in return for a pledge not to strike for at least five years. However, one union, Local 38 of the plumbers and pipefitters union, fought the issue in court and a jury, after being instructed by the judge that the strike was illegal, returned a verdict awarding compensatory damages to the city.

Last August, a state Court of Appeal upheld the verdict and the union took the case to the state Supreme Court.