Unions Win Right to Push Consumer Boycotts

In a major victory for embattled labor unions, the Supreme Court ruled Wednesday that union members may pass out leaflets urging consumer boycotts of businesses that deal directly with anti-union employers.

Unions have increasingly turned to such tactics in recent years as strikes and other traditional labor weapons have lost their effectiveness.

The National Labor Relations Board said in 1985 that such pressure tactics were illegal under federal labor law. The National Labor Relations Act forbids “secondary boycotts” of businesses that deal with employers involved in labor disputes and it prohibits union actions that “threaten, coerce or restrain” businesses that are not direct parties to the disputes.

Without a dissenting vote, the justices ruled against the NLRB and upheld unions’ rights to use peaceful and non-threatening means to “exert pressure” on businesses that have commercial dealings with the real targets of the union grievances. Thus the court narrowed the definition of the “secondary boycotts” that are proscribed by the National Labor Relations Act.

Since 1979, the Florida Gulf Coast Building and Construction Trades Council has been fighting the High Construction Co. in Tampa, Fla., because of its use of non-union laborers in building a large shopping mall. When picketing proved unsuccessful, union members distributed leaflets at the mall that urged consumers not to shop there.

The Edward J. DeBartolo Corp., owner of the mall, complained that this constituted an illegal secondary boycott.

The NRLB agreed in 1985 and said that such leafletting was illegal. A federal appeals court disagreed with that conclusion and both sides urged the Supreme Court to settle the issue.

Justice Byron R. White said that although union members clearly could not picket secondary businesses, merely passing out leaflets was not forbidden.

“We (do not) find any clear indication in the relevant legislative history that Congress intended to proscribe peaceful handbilling, unaccompanied by picketing, urging a consumer boycott of a neutral employer,” White wrote.

The union also had claimed a right to distribute leaflets under the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech, but White said that he did not need to rule on that issue.

Justices Sandra Day O’Connor and Antonin Scalia did not sign the opinion but concurred in the judgment in the case (DeBartolo Corp. vs. Florida Gulf Coast Trades Council, 86-1461).

In a second decision, however, the high court ruled against organized labor. It said that unions may not have their mail sent cost-free to members through the internal mail systems of universities and other employers.

The 6-2 decision, overturning a ruling of the California Public Employment Relations Board, said that union employees at UC Berkeley must send their correspondence through the U.S. Postal Service (Regents of the University of California vs. PERB, 86-935).