High Court Extends Job Protections to Organizers : Labor: Ruling likely to boost recruiting efforts. Justices say firms can’t fire employees who are also paid by unions.

In a decision expected to bolster labor-organizing efforts, the Supreme Court unanimously ruled Tuesday that paid union recruiters are protected against firing or other job discrimination by anti-union employers.

The 9-0 decision boosts a recent recruiting tactic known as “salting,” in which organizers and rank-and-file members on union payrolls are sprinkled into non-union work shops. The practice is used most often in the construction trades, where the percentage of union workers has fallen sharply in the past 20 years.

Until Tuesday, the federal courts had been split over whether these organizers were entitled to the protections of the National Labor Relations Act. That 1935 law protects employees from discrimination based on their union activities, but a federal appeals court in St. Louis last year said paid organizers are not true employees because their first loyalties remain with the union.

Disagreeing, the high court said the law is broadly worded to cover all employees without exception.

“A person can be a servant to two masters,” Justice Stephen G. Breyer said from the bench in explaining the decision.

Although salting has been used by unions on-and-off for decades, its popularity has re-emerged during the last several years as struggling American unions have sought fresh ways to boost their sagging membership. For labor leaders, it represents a way to plant recruiters directly into non-union workplaces, enabling them to chat informally during meal breaks or off hours with co-workers about the benefits of union membership.

Richard Slawson, executive director of the Los Angeles and Orange Counties Building & Construction Trades Council, said salting often is far more effective than the conventional practice of simply posting organizers outside the gates of a job sites handing out fliers.

Even with the stepped-up organizing efforts over the last few years, federal figures show that the percentage of construction workers belonging to unions has dropped from 42% in 1970 to 19% last year.

“If the [Supreme Court] decision had gone the other way, it would have been a disaster,” Slawson said.

Other union and Clinton Administration officials also hailed the court ruling.

John J. Barry, president of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers--the union involved in the Supreme Court case--said: “This decision represents a much-needed victory not only for us in the electrical construction industry, but also all workers who have seen their right to organize into unions badly eroded in recent years.”

Union advocates also said the court decision would curb rampant--and illegal--hiring discrimination against union members. “The decision makes it harder for employers to blacklist. That’s the bottom line,” said Richard Bensinger, executive director of the AFL-CIO’s Organizing Institute, which trains union organizers.

But construction industry officials reacted angrily and suggested they would seek a change in the law from the Republican-controlled Congress.

“If the consequence of this Supreme Court decision is that employers have to hire people to work for them who are already hired by unions as organizers, this battle has only started,” said Tim Word, president of the Associated General Contractors of America.

To “salt” non-union workplaces, the IBEW and other construction unions have dispatched organizers and union members to apply for jobs at non-union work sites.

“Typically, they will loudly announce they are union organizers, in effect daring the employer not to hire them,” one construction industry official said.

In the situation leading to the Supreme Court decision, Town & Country Electric Inc., a non-union contractor in Appleton, Wis., took the IBEW up on its dare. The electrical workers union sent 11 members, including two union staffers, to seek jobs when the company was about to begin a construction project in Minnesota. Only one of the 11 was hired, and he was soon dismissed after he persisted in touting the virtues of the union.

The fired and rejected workers complained to the NLRB and accused the company of “unfair labor practices,” and they won before an administrative law judge and the NLRB itself. But the U.S. appeals court reversed the board and said federal law did not consider these organizers as employees.

Clinton Administration lawyers appealed and won a unanimous reversal.

In issuing their decision, the Supreme Court justices, both conservatives and liberals, said their first duty is to follow the literal language of the law, which in this instance covers “any employee.”

“The ordinary dictionary definition of ‘employee’ includes any ‘person who works for another in return for financial or other compensation.’ That term does not exclude paid union organizers,” Breyer wrote in NLRB vs. Town & Country, 94-947.

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Savage reported from Washington and Silverstein reported from Los Angeles.