National Affairs: Sit-Down Out

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When 63 gassed, weeping, retching sit-downers fled from two North Chicago plants in 1937, they presented U. S. Labor and jurisprudence with the celebrated case of NLRB v. Fansteel Metallurgical Corp. (TIME, March 1, 1937, et. seq.). Issue: Sit-down v. Property.

This week the U. S. Supreme Court, reversing an NLRB order to Fansteel to rehire the strikers, ruled out the sit-down for good & all. Said Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes (Justices Reed & Black dissenting in part*): "The employes had the right to strike, but they had no license to commit acts of violence or to seize their employer's plant. ... To justify such conduct [as NLRB had justified it] because of the existence of a labor dispute or of an unfair labor practice would be to put a premium on resort to force instead of legal remedies and to subvert the principles of law and order which lie at the foundations of society. As [Fansteel's] unfair labor practices afforded no excuse for the seizure and holding of its buildings, [Fansteel] had its normal rights of redress. Those rights, in their most obvious scope, included the right to discharge the wrongdoers. . . ."

Two other reversals in lesser cases (Columbian Enameling & Stamping Co. Inc.; Sands Manufacturing Co.) made NLRB's Supreme Court score to date: 14 victories; four defeats.