Against Union Discrimination

Even after they win membership in once-segregated unions, Negroes often find that white union leaders refuse to negotiate their grievances against an employer. The National Labor Relations Act empowers the National Labor Relations Board to bar unfair labor practices by unions as well as employers, but the law does not specifically say that unfair representation is an unfair labor practice. As a result, unions have questioned the enforceability of NLRB orders to that effect, and many locals have continued to discriminate against their members on the basis of race or other arbitrary reasons.

That practice may now be ended. The NLRB has just won a highly significant victory against the United Rubber Workers of America's Local 12, which speaks for all workers at the Goodyear Tire & Rubber plant in East Gadsden, Ala. In 1960, Goodyear laid off eight Negroes who had more seniority than white workers who kept their jobs. The union, which agreed to separate seniority lists for each race, refused to help its Negro members. Even the union's international president, George Burdon, could not dissuade Local 12. Though federal negotiators got the Negroes reinstated in 1962, the local still refused to help them press for some 15 months' back wages.

After the NLRB upheld the Negroes on the ground that unfair representation is an unfair labor practice, Local 12 took its case to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in New Orleans and confidently cited the only precedent: in 1963, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in New York held that the pertinent language of the National Labor Relations Act does not make unfair representation an unfair labor practice.

The New Orleans court said that the New York court's interpretation would render the law "meaningless." Upholding the NLRB, the court also gave it primary jurisdiction over all unfair-representation cases in the Fifth Circuit, which covers Southern states. Since the NLRB is now the only forum for most such cases, aggrieved unionists will no longer be forced into lonely court battles at their own expense. NLRB lawyers will take over, giving complainants a far stronger ally than the new federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which fights union discrimination but sorely lacks enforcement powers.

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