explaining that there is “a ban on the prohibition of solicitation in areas other than immediate patient-care areas ‘where the [hospital] has not justified the prohibitions as necessary to avoid disruption of health care operations or disturbance of patients’ ”
How later courts described this case
- explaining that there is “a ban on the prohibition of solicitation in areas other than immediate patient-care areas ‘where the [hospital] has not justified the prohibitions as necessary to avoid disruption of health care operations or disturbance of patients’ ”
- noting that “courts have the duty to review [agency] presumptions both ‘for consistency with the Act, and for rationality.’ ” (quoting Beth Israel Hosp. v. NLRB, 437 U.S. 483, 501, 98 S.Ct. 2463, 57 L.Ed.2d 370 (1978))
- The Court permitted an employer to ban union solicitation in certain areas of the hospital in part because such solicitation, “in the presence or within the hearing of patients may have adverse effects on their recovery.”
- “Hospitals, after all, are not factories or mines or assembly plants. They are hospitals, where human ailments are treated, where patients and relatives alike often are under emotional strain and worry, where pleasing and comforting patients are principal facets of the day’s activity, and where the patient and his family . . . need a restful, uncluttered, relaxing, and helpful atmosphere . . . .” (citation omitted)
Written by the judges who cited it.
The opinion
Mr. Justice Blackmun,
concurring.
I join the Court’s opinion and its judgment. I write only to underline what is plainly said in the opinion, ante, at 789-790, and n. 16, that these hospital cases so often turn on the proof presented. What may be true of one hospital’s gift shop and cafeteria may not be true of another’s. And I continue to have difficulty perceiving any rational distinction between the Board’s recognition that solicitation is inappropriate in a department store, see Beth Israel Hospital v. NLRB, 437 U. S. 483, 511-512 , and nn. 2 and 3 (1978) (Powell, J., concurring in judgment); id., at 508 (concurring opinion), and its contrary presumption with respect to the retail shop (usually operated on a not-for-profit basis) and cafeteria in the hospital. The admonition contained in the last paragraph of n. 16 of the Court’s opinion, ante, at 790, cannot be overemphasized.