noting that ten states permit public employees to strike "unless such strikes endanger the public health, safety, or welfare" and explaining that "[t]he statutes generally prohibit strikes by police and fire-protection employees, employees in correctional facilities, and those in health-care institutions"
How later courts described this case
- noting that ten states permit public employees to strike "unless such strikes endanger the public health, safety, or welfare" and explaining that "[t]he statutes generally prohibit strikes by police and fire-protection employees, employees in correctional facilities, and those in health-care institutions"
- noting the original prohibition of strikes by federal employees in the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947
- reviewing and answering the standard objections to public sector strikes.
Written by the judges who cited it.
The opinion
GRODIN, J., Concurring.
Though I have signed Justice Broussard’s plurality opinion, I write separately in response to the concerns expressed in the concurring opinion by Justice Kaus.
I suggest there is little merit in attempting to distinguish, with regard to strikes by employees covered by the Meyers-Milias-Brown Act, between the availability of an injunction at common law and the availability of a damage action. If an injunction is violated, the violation can give rise to a proceeding in contempt for which monetary sanctions may be imposed. The underlying legal question is whether there exists a common law predicate for either remedy. The plurality opinion holds, and I agree, that the MeyersMilias-Brown Act has removed the principal theoretical justification which had been advanced in this state for the proposition that all strikes by local government employees are tortious. Finding no alternative justification sufficiently compelling to require acceptance by the courts in the absence of legislative action, except as regards strikes which imperil public health or safety, the opinion properly places the ball in the Legislature’s court, where it belongs. {Ante, p. 591, fn. 39.)
Other states and countries have developed a wide range of policies for dealing with public employee strikes, and the arena is clearly one in which experimentation should be encouraged. Consequently, I share Justice Kaus’ concern that we should not attempt to prejudge the constitutionality of any particular legislative response. The plurality opinion explicitly finds it unnecessary to reach the issue in constitutional terms {ante, p. 591), and as I understand it discusses the Constitution only in order to demonstrate that were we to adopt the district’s position—that there exists an absolute common law ban on public employee strikes in the context of the present statutory scheme—substantial questions of constitutional dimension would arise. {Ibid.) It is with that understanding that I join in the opinion.