Reference no: EM131280927
ALLEN, J.... The principal question in this case is whether the defendants should be enjoined against maintaining the patrol. The report shows that, following upon a strike of the plaintiff's workmen, the defendants conspired to prevent him from getting workmen and thereby to prevent him from carrying on his business, unless and until he should adopt a certain schedule of prices. The means adopted were persuasion and social pressure, threats of personal injury or unlawful harm conveyed to persons employed or seeking employment, and a patrol of two men in front of the plaintiff's factory, maintained from half past six in the morning till half past five in the afternoon, on one of the busiest streets of Boston. The number of men was greater at times, and at times showed some little disposition to stop at the plaintiff's door.
The patrol proper at times went further than simple advice not obtruded beyond the point where the other person was willing to listen; and it was found that the patrol would probably be continued if not enjoined. There was also some evidence of persuasion to break existing contracts. The patrol was maintained as one of the means of carrying out the defendant's plan, and it was used in combination with social pressure, threats of personal injury or unlawful harm, and persuasion to break existing contracts.
It was thus one means of intimidation, indirectly to the plaintiff, and directly to persons actually employed, or seeking to be employed, by the plaintiff, and of rendering such employment unpleasant and intolerable to such persons. Such an act is an unlawful interference with the rights of both the employer and of the employed. An employer has a right to engage all persons who are willing to work for him, at such prices as may be mutually agreed upon, and persons employed or seeking employment have a corresponding right to enter into or remain in the employment of any person or corporation willing to employ them. These rights are secured by the [C]onstitution itself....
The defendants contend that these acts were justifiable because they were only seeking to secure better wages for themselves by compelling the plaintiff to accept their schedule of wages. This motive or purpose does not justify maintaining a patrol in front of the plaintiff's premises, as a means of carrying out their conspiracy. A combination among persons merely to regulate their own conduct is within allowable competition, and is lawful, although others may be indirectly affected thereby. But a combination to do injurious acts expressly directed to another, by way of intimidation or constraint, either of himself or of persons employed or seeking to be employed by him, is outside of allowable competition, and is unlawful.... We therefore think that the injunction should be in the form originally issued. So ordered. HOLMES, J. (dissenting) ...
One of the eternal conflicts out of which life is made up is that between the efforts of every man to get the most he can for his services, and that of society, disguised under the name of capital, to get his services for the least possible return. Combination on the one side is patent and powerful. Combination on the other is the necessary and desirable counterpart, if the battle is to be carried on in a fair and equal way.... If it be true that workingmen may combine with a view, among other things, to getting as much as they can for their labor, just as capital may combine with a view to getting the greatest possible return, it must be true that, when combined, they have the same liberty that combined capital has, to support their interest by argument, persuasion, and the bestowal or refusal of those advantages which they otherwise lawfully control. I can remember when many thought that, apart from violence or breach of contract, strikes were wicked, as organized refusals to work.
I suppose that intelligent economists and legislators have given up that notion today. I feel pretty confident that they equally will abandon the idea that an organized refusal by workmen of social intercourse with a man who shall enter their antagonist's employ is unlawful, if it is disassociated from any threat of violence, and is made for the sole object of prevailing, if possible, in a contest with their employer about the rate of wages. The fact that the immediate object of the act by which the benefit to themselves is to be gained is to injure their antagonist does not necessarily make it unlawful, any more than when a great house lowers the price of goods for the purpose and with the effect of driving a smaller antagonist from the business...
Case Questions
1. Was the picketing peaceful or tainted with violence?
2. What was the scope of the court's injunction?
3. In his classic dissent, how does Justice Holmes justify the infliction of injury by a labor organization?