Summit County Labor News

Court to Rule on Crossing Picket Line

The Supreme Court has agreed to rule on a lower court decision which, government lawyers asserted, "affects virtually every employee who refuses to cross a picket line, and virtually every labor organization which utilizes picketing as a means of enlisting the support of other workers in a labor dispute."

When Charles Waugh, a driver for the independent Newspaper and Mail Deliverers Union of New York, refused to cross a picket line of the Nassau County Typographical Union, he was fired in March, 1950, by his employer, the Rockaway News Supply Company.

The firm distributes the newspaper Nassau Daily Review Star, which was picketed, and Waugh had served notice on his foreman that "as a union man he would not cross that picket line and thereby become a scab or strikebreaker."

Waugh's reinstatement with back pay was ordered by the National Labor Relations Board but a Federal Circuit Court set aside the order and (Continued on Page Four)
Picket Line
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the Justice Department, in behalf of the NLRB, appealed to the high court.

At issue, said the government's appeal, was "whether an employer violates the National Labor Relations Act by discharging an employee for refusing, during the course of his employment, to cross a lawful picket line of a labor organization of which he is not a member at the premises of an employer other than his own."

The lower court, in upsetting the NLRB contention that Waugh was illegally dismissed, said that "of course" a worker was free to exercise his right to refuse to cross a picket line when "on his own time."

Then it added: "But he is not free to exercise the right during his working time in violation of his employer's working rules by refusing to perform that part of his regular duties which requires him to cross the picket line. To hold otherwise would be to permit an employee unilaterally to dictate the terms of his employment, which it is well settled he may not do."