Carpenters & Joiners Union, Local No. 213 v. Ritter's Cafe

315 U.S. 722, 62 S. Ct. 807, 86 L. Ed. 1143, 1942 U.S. LEXIS 1150

Opinions

Mr. Justice Frankfurter

delivered the opinion of the Court.

The facts of this case are simple. Ritter, the respondent, made an agreement with a contractor named Plaster for the construction of a building at 2810 Broadway, Houston, Texas. The contract gave Plaster the right to make his own arrangements regarding the employment of labor in the construction of the building. He employed nonunion carpenters and painters. The respondent was also the owner of Ritter’s Cafe, a restaurant at 418 Broadway, a mile and a half away. So far as the record discloses, the new building was wholly unconnected with the business of Ritter’s Cafe. All of the restaurant employees were members of the Hotel and Restaurant Employees International Alliance, Local 808. As to their restaurant work, there was no controversy between Ritter and his employees or their union. Nor did the carpenters’ and painters’ unions, the petitioners here, have any quarrel with Ritter over his operation of the restaurant. No construction work of any kind was performed at the restaurant, and no carpenters or painters were employed there.

But because Plaster employed non-union labor, members of the carpenters’ and painters’ unions began to picket Ritter’s Cafe immediately after the construction got under way. Walking back and forth in front of the restaurant, a picket carried a placard which read: “This Place is Unfair to Carpenters and Joiners Union of America, Local No. 213, and Painters Local No. 130, Affiliated with American Federation of Labor.” Later on, the wording was changed as follows: “The Owner of This Cafe Has Awarded a Contract to Erect a Building to W. A. Plaster Who is Unfair to the Carpenters Union 213 and Painter Union 130, Affiliated With the American Federation of Labor.” According to the undisputed finding of the Texas courts, which is controlling here, Ritter’s Cafe was picketed “for the avowed purpose of forcing and compelling plaintiff [Ritter] to require the said contractor, Plaster, to use and employ only members of the defendant unions on the building under construction in the 2800 block on Broadway.” Contemporaneously with this picketing, the restaurant workers’ union, Local No. 808, called Ritter’s employees out on strike and withdrew the union card from his establishment. Union truck drivers refused to cross the picket line to deliver food and other supplies to the restaurant. The effect of all this was “to prevent members of all trades-unions from patronizing plaintiff’s cafe and to erect a barrier around plaintiff’s cafe, across which no member of defendant-unions or an affiliate will go.” A curtailment of sixty per cent of Ritter’s business resulted.

Holding the petitioners’ activities to constitute a violation of the state anti-trust law, Texas Penal Code, Art. 1632 et seq., the Texas Court of Civil Appeals enjoined them from picketing Ritter’s Cafe. The decree forbade neither picketing elsewhere (including the building under construction by Plaster) nor communication of the facts of the dispute by any means other than the picketing of Ritter’s restaurant. 149 S. W. 2d 694. We brought the case here to consider the claim that the decree of the Court of Civil Appeals (the Supreme Court of Texas having refused a writ of error) infringed the freedom of speech guaranteed by the Due Process Clause of the Eourteenth Amendment. 314 U. S. 595.

The economic contest between employer and employee has never concerned merely the immediate disputants. The clash of such conflicting interests inevitably implicates the well-being of the community. Society has therefore been compelled to throw its weight into the contest. The law has undertaken to balance the effort of the employer to carry on his business free from the interference of others against the effort of labor to further its economic self-interest. And every intervention of government in this struggle has in some respect abridged the freedom of action of one or the other or both.

The task of mediating between these competing interests has, until recently, been left largely to judicial lawmaking and not to legislation. “Courts were required, in the absence of legislation, to determine what the public welfare demanded; — whether it would not be best subserved by leaving the contestants free to resort to any means not involving a breach of the peace or injury to tangible property; whether it was consistent with the public interest that the contestants should be permitted to invoke the aid of others not directly interested in the matter in controversy; and to what extent incidental injury to persons not parties to the controversy should be held justifiable.” Mr. Justice Brandéis in Truax v. Corrigan, 257 U. S. 312, 363. The right of the state to determine whether the common interest is best served by imposing some restrictions upon the use of weapons for inflicting economic injury in the struggle of conflicting industrial forces has not previously been doubted. See Mr. Justice Holmes, in Aikens v. Wisconsin, 195 U. S. 194, 205, and Mr. Justice Brandeis in Truax v. Corrigan, supra, at 372, Dorchy v. Kansas, 272 U. S. 306, 311, and Senn v. Tile Layers Protective Union, 301 U. S. 468, 481. But the petitioners now claim that there is to be found in the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment a constitutional command that peaceful picketing must be wholly immune from regulation by the community in order to protect the general interest, that the states must be powerless to confine the use of this industrial weapon within reasonable bounds.

The constitutional right to communicate peaceably to the public the facts of a legitimate dispute is not lost merely because a labor dispute is involved, Thornhill v. Alabama, 310 U. S. 88, or because the communication takes the form of picketing, even when the communication does not concern a dispute between an employer and those directly employed by him. American Federation of Labor v. Swing, 312 U. S. 321. But the circumstance that a labor dispute is the occasion of exercising freedom of expression does not give that freedom any greater constitutional sanction or render it completely inviolable. Where, as here, claims on behalf of free speech are met with claims on behalf of the authority of the state to impose reasonable regulations for the protection of the community as a whole, the duty of this Court is plain. Whenever state action is challenged as a denial of “liberty,” the question always is whether the state has violated “the essential attributes of that liberty.” Mr. Chief Justice Hughes in Near v. Minnesota, 283 U. S. 697, 708. While the right of free speech is embodied in the liberty safeguarded by the Due Process Clause, that Clause postulates the authority of the states to translate into law local policies “to promote the health, safety, morals and general welfare of its people. . . . The limits of this sovereign power must always be determined with appropriate regard to the particular subject of its exercise.” Ibid., at 707. “The boundary at which the conflicting interests balance cannot be determined by any general formula in advance, but points in the line, or helping to establish it, are fixed by decisions that this or that concrete case falls on the nearer or farther side.” Hudson Water Co. v. McCarter, 209 U. S. 349, 355.

In the circumstances of the case before us, Texas has declared that its general welfare would not be served if, in > a controversy between a contractor and building workers’ unions, the unions were permitted to bring to bear the full weight of familiar weapons of industrial combat against a restaurant business, which, as a business, has no nexus with the building dispute but which happens to be owned by a person who contracts with the builder. The precise question is, therefore, whether the Fourteenth Amendment prohibits Texas from drawing this line in confining the area of unrestricted industrial warfare.

Texas has undertaken to localize industrial conflict by prohibiting the exertion of concerted pressure directed at the business, wholly out-side the economic context of the real dispute, of a person whose relation to the dispute arises from his business dealings with one of the disputants. The state has not attempted to outlaw whatever psychological pressure may be involved in the mere communication by an individual of the facts relating to his differences with another. Nor are we confronted here with a limitation upon speech in circumstances where there exists an “interdependence of economic interest of all engaged in the same industry,” American Federation of Labor v. Swing, 312 U. S. 321, 326. Compare Journeymen Tailors Union Local No. 195 v. Miller’s, Inc., 312 U. S. 658, and Bakery & Pastry Drivers & Helpers Local No. 802 v. Wohl, post, p. 769. The line drawn by Texas in this case is not the line drawn by New York in the Wohl case. The dispute there related to the conditions under which bakery products were sold and delivered to retailers. The business of the retailers was therefore directly involved in the dispute. In picketing the retail establishments, the union members would only be following the subject-matter of their dispute. Here we have a different situation. The dispute concerns the labor conditions surrounding the construction of a building by a contractor. Texas has deemed it desirable to insulate from the dispute an establishment which industrially has no connection with the dispute. Texas has not attempted to protect other business enterprises of the building contractor, Plaster, who is the petitioners’ real adversary. We need not therefore consider problems that would arise if Texas had undertaken to draw such a line.

It is true that by peaceful picketing workingmen communicate their grievances. As a means of communicating the facts of a labor dispute, peaceful picketing may be a phase of the constitutional right of free utterance. But recognition of peaceful picketing as an exercise of free speech does not imply that the states must be without power to confine the sphere of communication to that directly related to the dispute. Restriction of picketing to the area of the industry within which a labor dispute arises leaves open to the disputants other traditional modes of communication. To deny to the states the power to draw this line is to write into the Constitution the notion that every instance of peaceful picketing— anywhere and under any circumstances — is necessarily a phase of the controversy which provoked the picketing. Such a view of the Due Process Clause would compel the states to allow the disputants in a particular industrial episode to conscript neutrals having no relation to either the dispute or the industry in which it arose.

In forbidding such conscription of neutrals, in the circumstances of the case before us, Texas represents the prevailing, and probably the unanimous, policy of the states.¹ We hold that the Constitution does not forbid Texas to draw the line which has been drawn here. To hold otherwise would be to transmute vital constitutional liberties into doctrinaire dogma. We must be mindful that “the rights of employers and employees to conduct their economic affairs and to compete with others for a share in the products of industry are subject to modification or qualification in the interests of the society in which they exist. This is but an instance of the power of the State to set the limits of permissible contest open to industrial combatants.” Thornhill v. Alabama, 310 U. S. 88, 103-04.

It is not for us to assess the wisdom of the policy underlying the law of Texas. Our duty is at an end when we find that the Fourteenth Amendment does not deny her the power to enact that policy into law.

Affirmed.

1

The authorities are collected in Teller, Labor Disputes and Collective Bargaining (1940), § 123; Hellerstein, Secondary Boycotts in Labor Disputes, 47 Yale L. J. 341; Frey, Cases on Labor Law (1941), pp. 239-73; cf. Galenson and Spector, The New York Labor-Injunction Statute and the Courts, 42 Col. L. Rev. 51, 68-71.