National Labor Relations Board v. Highland Park Mfg Company/Dissent Douglas

by William O. Douglas

United States Supreme Court

341 U.S. 322

National Labor Relations Board  v.  Highland Park Mfg Company

 Argued: April 23, 1951. --- Decided: May 14, 1951

Mr. Justice DOUGLAS, dissenting.

I see no answer to the analysis of Mr. Justice FRANKFURTER if objectivity is our standard and if the expertise of administrative agencies is to continue as our guide. In situations no more difficult than this we have taken the administrative construction of statutory words. Until today the test has been not whether the construction would be our own if we sat as the Board, but whether it has a reasonable basis in custom, practice, or legislative history. See Gray v. Powell, 314 U.S. 402, 62 S.Ct. 326, 86 L.Ed. 301; National Labor Relations Board v. Hearst Publications, 322 U.S. 111, 64 S.Ct. 851, 88 L.Ed. 1170.

Of course the C.I.O. is at times a 'national or international labor organization' within the meaning of the Act. The Board so held in American Optical Co., 81 N.L.R.B. 453. In that case the petitioning labor organization was an 'organizing committee' of the C.I.O. over which the C.I.O. had control comparable to the power a 'national or international' union exercises over its constituent unions. The same would be true of local unions directly chartered by the C.I.O. If one of those unions had filed the complaint against respondent, then the C.I.O. would have to file the affidavits, since it would be in the relation of a 'national or international labor organization' to that dispute. A labor organization which has that relation to a dispute has the power and control at which the affidavit provision is aimed. If we took, as we customarily do, the administrative construction of the words Congress used, we would hold that the C.I.O. must file the affidavits only when in the dispute before the Board it stands, as it sometimes does, in the position of 'national or international labor organization'-to use the parlance of the trade. But that is a different case from the one before us.

Notes