Pennsylvania Railroad Company v. Rychlik/Concurrence Frankfurter

by Felix Frankfurter

United States Supreme Court

352 U.S. 480

Pennsylvania Railroad Company  v.  Rychlik

 Argued: Dec. 10, 1956. --- Decided: Feb 25, 1957

Mr. Justice FRANKFURTER, concurring.

The decision below, if allowed to stand, would tend to dislocate the scheme that Congress has seen fit to devise for the regulation of industrial relations on railroads, and so I join in reversing the judgment. But I get there by a different route from the Court's. In my view of the Railway Labor Act, the District Court had no jurisdiction of this action and the complaint should be dismissed for want of it, not on the merits.

The governing outlook for construing the Railway Labor Act is hospitable realization of the fact that it is primarily an instrument of industrial government for railroading by the industry itself, through the concentrated agencies of railroad executives and the railroad unions. For details, see the dissenting opinions in Elgin, Joliet & Eastern R. Co. v. Burley, 325 U.S. 711, 749, 65 S.Ct. 1282, 1302, 89 L.Ed. 1886; Id., 327 U.S. 661, 667, 66 S.Ct. 721, 723, 90 L.Ed. 928. The dominant inference that the Court has drawn from this fact is exclusion of the courts from this process of collaborative self-government. See, e.g., General Committee, etc., v. Missouri-Kansas-Texas R. Co., 320 U.S. 323, 64 L.Ct. 146, 88 L.Ed. 76; Order of Railway Conductors v. Pitney, 326 U.S. 561, 66 S.Ct. 322, 90 L.Ed. 318; Slocum v. Delaware, Lackawanna & Western R. Co., 339 U.S. 239, 70 S.Ct. 577, 94 L.Ed. 795. Neither Moore v. Illinois Central R. Co., 312 U.S. 630, 61 S.Ct. 754, 85 L.Ed. 1089, nor Order of Railway Conductors v. Swan, 327 U.S. 520, 67 S.Ct. 405, 91 L.Ed. 471, is fairly to be deemed an exception to the general principle and, in any event, those cases involve circumstances not relevant to the present situation.

There is one qualification to the principle I have stated, or, rather, there is a counter-principle to be respected. This is the doctrine established by Steele v. Louisville & N.R. Co., 323 U.S. 192, 65 S.Ct. 226, 89 L.Ed. 173. The short of it is that since every railroad employee is represented by union agents who sit on a System Board of Adjustment, such representatives are in what amounts to a fiduciary position: they must not exercise their power in an arbitrary way against some minority interest. The fact of a general conflict of interest between a minority of union members and representatives designated by the majority does not of itself vitiate the presupposition of self-government and does not of itself subject the System Board action to judicial review. Conflict between a majority and a minority is a commonplace in the whole collective bargaining process. But the bargaining representatives owe a judicially enforceable duty of fairness to all the commonents of the working force when a specific claim is in controversy.

The determination of the System Board on the merits is not open to judicial review, even on so-called legal questions. It is not for a court to say that a complaint against the System Board must fail because the System Board rightly held against the complainant. Right or wrong, a court has no jurisdiction to review what the System Board did, unless a complainant asserts arbitrariness and seeks to enforce the limited protection established in the Steele case. It is not for a court to decide as an abstract issue what procedure a union must or may pursue to establish its status as an organization 'national in scope,' within § 2, Eleventh (c) of the Railway Labor Act, nor whether or when an individual claiming through such a rival union may assert its claim for his benefit. As bearing on the legal complexities raised by such interrelationship between a member and an organization, see the opinion of Mr. Justice Jackson in Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee v. McGrath, 341 U.S. 123, 183, 71 S.Ct. 624, 654, 95 L.Ed. 817.

For Rychlik to have brought himself within the Steele case it would have been necessary to charge that the System Board had made its determination arbitrarily and that on the basis of this arbitrary determination he had been discharged. On such a claim, and only on such a claim, would he have been entitled to judicial relief. In the absence of such a claim, the District Court was without jurisdiction to entertain the complaint.

Notes