Vegelahn v. Guntner

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Vegelahn v. Guntner, an 1896 labor law decision from the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts, is more noted for its famous dissent, written by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., than its majority opinion.

In this case the union had picketed in front of the employer's business with the object of persuading current employees and job applicants to not enter the building. The union also picketed to pressure workers to break employment contracts with the company. The objective was to force higher wages. The company successfully sought an injunction in court, under the doctrine of intentional interference with contract, alleging that the union was tortiously interfering with the relations between management and worker. In this era employers frequently resorted to state and federal courts to get restraining orders and injunctions to stop picketing, strikes, and boycotts. On this appeal from the trial court, Justice Allen held that the coercion and intimidation found to have occurred interfered with the right of an employer to hire whom it pleases, and the right of workers to enter into employment. The court ruled that the union was guilty of an intentional tort.

Justice Holmes disagreed, equating the use of collective force by workers to the corporate use of force to compete. "One of the eternal conflicts out of which life is made up is that between the efforts of every man to get the most he can for his services, and that of society, disguised under the name of capital, to get his services for the least possible return. Combination on the one side is patent and powerful. Combination on the other is the necessary and desirable counterpart, if the battle is to be carried on in a fair and equal way....The fact that the immediate object of the act by which the benefit to [the unionized workers] is to be gained is to injure [the employer] does not necessarily make it unlawful, any more than when a great house lowers the price of goods for the purpose and with the effect of driving a smaller antagonist from the business..." This was one of the very first occasions when any judge of prominence had made such a declaration.

The Vegelahn case was decided in 1896, in a decade when immigrant workers were taking native Americans' jobs and were unionizing, and when the public had witnessed violent and far-flung labor unrest: with the Pullman Strike, the Homestead, Pennsylvania violence between steel workers and Carnegie Steel, and the Haymarket riot in Chicago. It would be another twenty-five years before the law would catch up to Holmes's dissent, with the passage of the federal Anti-Injunction Act (Norris-LaGuardia Act).

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