Supreme Court Reverses Anti-Union Decision : Labor: Overturned was a ruling making it easier for strike-torn companies to withdraw union recognition.

The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday reversed a federal appeals court ruling on union representation in strike-torn companies that had been regarded as potentially disastrous to organized labor.

By a 5-4 margin, the court reversed a ruling that said the National Labor Relations Board must presume strikebreakers oppose the strikers’ union.

Such a presumption would have, in effect, permitted a business to automatically withdraw recognition of a striking union once it had hired permanent replacements.

The appeals court ruling, made in a Texas case, further weakened the leverage of unions in labor disputes. Although the 1935 National Labor Relations Act guarantees workers the right to strike, a series of court rulings and more aggressive employer practices in the past decade have left many workers jobless after they strike.

It is now commonplace--as in the current Greyhound bus strike--for employers to hire permanent replacements after workers go on strike. Often, strikers are left out in the cold unless their union can prove to the NLRB that the employer was guilty of unfair labor practices.

This increased vulnerability of strikers is considered largely responsible for a sharp decline in the number of strikes. While the number of strikes called between 1980 and 1987 dropped by 30%, the number of walkouts in which strikers were replaced with permanent new hires rose 300%, according to a recent congressional study.

At issue in Tuesday’s case was how the union sympathies of these replacement workers should be interpreted under federal labor law.

The case involved Curtin Matheson Scientific Inc., which was hit by a strike in 1979 by workers at its Houston warehouse after a collective bargaining agreement expired. The company locked out all 27 Teamsters Union members who worked there. Five of the 27 workers crossed the picket line when the strike began. The company soon hired 29 new employees to replace the remaining 22 strikers.

When the union later offered to end the strike under terms previously offered by management, Curtin Matheson withdrew the offer along with its recognition of the Teamsters as the employees’ bargaining agent.

The National Labor Relations Board in 1987 ruled that the company illegally withdrew its union recognition. The board said the company acted without adequate reason to believe the Teamsters lacked support from a majority of the plant’s workers.

However, the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals overturned the labor board’s ruling in 1988. It ruled that the company “was justified in doubting that the striker replacements supported the union.” The board must presume that striker replacements oppose the union, the appeals court said.

But Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, who wrote the majority opinion, said the appeals court was wrong. “Replacements may in some circumstances desire union representation despite their willingness to cross the picket line,” he wrote. “In addition, a replacement, like a non-striker or a strike crossover, may disagree with the purpose or strategy of the particular strike and refuse to support that strike while still wanting that union’s representation at the bargaining table.”