Twa v. Flight Attendants, 489 U.S. 426 (1989)

Trans World Airlines, Inc. v. Independent

Federation of Flight Attendants
No. 87-548

Argued November 7, 1988
Decided February 28, 1989
489 U.S. 426

CERTIORARI TO THE UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS FOR

THE EIGHTH CIRCUIT

Syllabus

Although petitioner airline (TWA) and respondent flight attendants’ union (IFFA) pursued all the required dispute resolution mechanisms of the Railway Labor Act (RLA), their negotiations over a new collective bargaining agreement were unsuccessful. The parties bargained over wages and working conditions, but not over the existing agreement’s seniority system, which ensured that the most senior qualified attendant who bid on a vacant job assignment, flight schedule, or base of operation (domicile) would obtain it, and would be least affected by periodic furloughs. During the IFFA’s subsequent strike, TWA continued operations by hiring permanent replacements for strikers, by continuing to employ attendants who chose not to strike, and by rehiring strikers who abandoned the strike, and filled strike-created vacancies by application of the existing seniority bidding system to all working attendants. After the strike ended, and pursuant to its preannounced policy, TWA refused to displace permanent replacements or junior nonstriking attendants ("crossover" employees) with senior full-term strikers, many of whom were therefore left without an opportunity to return to work. Although a post-strike arbitral agreement guaranteed that all reinstated full-term strikers would be returned to work as vacancies arose and with precisely the seniority they would have had if no strike had occurred, the IFFA filed the instant action contending that, even assuming the strike was economic, the full-term strikers were entitled to displace the newly hired replacements and the less senior crossover attendants either under the terms of the prestrike collective bargaining agreement or under the RLA itself. The District Court denied relief for the most part, but the Court of Appeals, relying on its reading of the pre-strike agreement and on judicial interpretation of the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), reversed the lower court’s ruling that the more senior full-term strikers could not displace junior crossovers.

Held: An employer is not required by the RLA to lay off junior crossover employees in order to reinstate more senior full-term strikers at the conclusion of a strike. Pp. 432-443.

(a) Nothing in the federal common labor law developed under the NLRA, which may provide guiding precedent in RLA cases, indicates that TWA’s crossover policy is unlawful. In fact, under NLRB v.Mackay Radio & Telegraph Co., 304 U.S. 333, and its progeny, it is not an unfair labor practice under the NLRA for an employer to refuse to discharge replacement employees in order to make room for strikers at the end of an economic strike. The IFFA’s argument that the Mackay Radio rule is inapplicable to junior crossovers, because those workers must be treated differently than newly hired permanent replacements (who, the union concedes, need not be displaced) is rejected, since full-term strikers at TWA, once reinstated, have lost no seniority either in absolute or relative terms, and will be able to displace junior flight attendants -- whether new hires, crossovers, or full-term strikers -- with regard to future reductions in force, vacancies in desirable assignments or domiciles, or periodic bids on job scheduling, and since any "cleavage" between junior crossovers and reinstated full-term strikers is merely the inevitable effect of TWA’s lawful use of the economic weapons available to it during a period of self-help. NLRB v. Erie Resistor Corp., 373 U.S. 221, distinguished. To differentiate between crossovers and new hires in the manner the IFFA proposes would have the effect of penalizing those who exercised their right not to strike, which is protected both by the RLA and the NLRA, in order to benefit those who did strike, a result that is not required by the NLRA. Pp. 432-439.

(b) TWA’s crossover policy is not forbidden by the RLA itself, which, in fact, provides greater avenues of self-help to parties that have exhausted the statute’s extensive dispute resolution mechanisms than would be available under the NLRA. Section 2 Fourth of the RLA -- which prohibits carriers from "influenc[ing] or coerc[ing] employees . . . not to join . . . any labor organization" -- does not prohibit the policy, since that section is addressed primarily to the precertification rights of unorganized employees to organize and choose their representatives, with the intent of protecting the dispute-resolution procedures’ effectiveness by assuring that the employees’ putative representative is not subject to employer control, and that neither party will be able to enlist the courts to further its own partisan ends. Where, as here, the parties have exhausted those procedures and have reached an impasse, they are free, without threat of judicial involvement, to turn to any peaceful, self-help measures that do not strike a fundamental blow to union or employer activity and the collective bargaining process itself. Moreover, as the IFFA concedes, nothing in the collective bargaining agreement or any post-strike agreement prohibits TWA’s crossover policy. Pp. 439-442.

(c) TWA’s decision to guarantee to crossovers the same protections lawfully applied to new hires was a decision to apply the preexisting seniority terms of the collective bargaining agreement uniformly to all employees. That this decision had the effect of encouraging pre-strike workers to remain on the job during the strike or to abandon the strike before all vacancies were filled was simply an effect of TWA’s lawful exercise of its peaceful economic power. P. 443.

819 F.2d 839, reversed.

O’CONNOR, J., delivered the opinion of the Court, in which REHNQUIST, C.J., and WHITE, STEVENS, SCALIA, and KENNEDY, JJ., joined. BRENNAN, J., filed a dissenting opinion, in which MARSHALL, J., joined, post, p. 443. BLACKMUN, J., filed a dissenting opinion, in Parts I and II of which BRENNAN, J., joined, post, p. 452.