For the reasons above stated a majority of the court are of opinion that the case should have been submitted to the jury.
Exceptions sustained.[[614]]
PICKETT v. WALSH
Supreme Judicial Court, Massachusetts, October 16, 1906.
Reported in 192 Massachusetts Reports, 572.
The plaintiffs were brick and stone “pointers.” The defendants were officers and members of bricklayers’ unions and stonemasons’ unions.[[615]]
One ground of complaint was that the defendants prevented the employment of the plaintiffs as “pointers” by notifying contractors that they would not lay the bricks or do the mason work on any building unless they were also employed to do the pointing of the brick and stone masonry. “The defendants in effect say we want the work of pointing the brick and stone laid by us, and you must give us all or none of the work.”[[616]] The court held that this conduct, although disastrous to the plaintiffs and damaging to the building contractors, was justifiable. “... it was within the rights of these unions to compete for the work of doing the pointing, and, in the exercise of their right of competition, to refuse to lay bricks and set stone unless they were given the work of pointing them when laid.”[[617]]
The other ground of action in Pickett v. Walsh was quite distinct from the foregoing. The firm of L. P. Soule & Son Company were the general contractors for the erection of the Ford building; but they had nothing to do with the employment of “pointers.” The pointing of that building was being done under a contract between the owners of the building and Pickett, a pointer who was one of the plaintiffs. Other buildings were being erected for other owners, on which the Soule Company were the general contractors, and as to which no complaint existed in reference to the pointing. The bricklaying and masonry on these other buildings were being done by members of the defendants’ union. The defendant officials induced all the bricklayers and masons to quit working for the Soule Company on these other buildings, because that company “was doing work on another building [the Ford building] in which work was being done by pointers, employed not by the L. P. Soule & Son Company but [by] the owners of the building.” The evident purpose was to thus induce the Soule Company to exert pressure on the owners of the Ford building to discontinue the employment of the pointers (Pickett et als.). The court held that this conduct was not justifiable. The decision is not based on the ground that the defendants were intentionally inducing, or attempting to induce, a breach of contract; but on the broad ground that the forcing a neutral third person to exert a pressure on the plaintiff’s employer was not a lawful means of competition.
Loring, J.[[618]]
That strike has an element in it like that in a sympathetic strike, in a boycott, and in a blacklisting, namely: It is a refusal to work for A, with whom the strikers have no dispute, for the purpose of forcing A to force B to yield to the strikers’ demands. In the case at bar the strike on the L. P. Soule & Son Company was a strike on that contractor to force it to force the owner of the Ford building to give the work of pointing to the defendant unions. That passes beyond a case of competition where the owner of the Ford building is left to choose between the two competitors. Such a strike is in effect compelling the L. P. Soule & Son Company to join in a boycott on the owner of the Ford building. It is a combination by the union to obtain a decision in their favor by forcing third persons who have no interest in the dispute to force the employer to decide the dispute in their (the defendant union’s) favor. Such a strike is not a justifiable interference with the right of the plaintiffs to pursue their calling as they think best. In our opinion organized labor’s right of coercion and compulsion is limited to strikes on persons with whom the organization has a trade dispute; or to put it in another way, we are of the opinion that a strike on A, with whom the striker has no trade dispute, to compel A to force B to yield to the strikers’ demands, is an unjustifiable interference with the right of A to pursue his calling as he thinks best.[[619]]
BARR v. THE ESSEX TRADES COUNCIL
Court of Chancery, New Jersey, October Term, 1894.
Reported in 53 New Jersey Equity Reports, 101.
On order to show cause why injunction should not issue.[[620]]