Cole v. Hall

• Decision Date: 07 January 1965
• Docket Number: No. 140,Docket 29087.,140
• Citation: 339 F.2d 881
• Parties: John J. COLE, Plaintiff-Appellee, v. Paul HALL, individually and as President or Al Kerr, as Secretary-Treasurer, or Earl Shepard, as Vice-President, or Cal Tanner, as Executive Vice-President, of the Seafarers International Union of North America — Atlantic, Gulf, Lakes and Inland Waters District, Defendants-Appellants.
• Court: U.S. Court of Appeals — Second Circuit

339 F.2d 881 (1965)

John J. COLE, Plaintiff-Appellee, v. Paul HALL, individually and as President or Al Kerr, as Secretary-Treasurer, or Earl Shepard, as Vice-President, or Cal Tanner, as Executive Vice-President, of the Seafarers International Union of North America — Atlantic, Gulf, Lakes and Inland Waters District, Defendants-Appellants.

No. 140, Docket 29087.

United States Court of Appeals Second Circuit.

Argued October 30, 1964.

Decided January 7, 1965.

Burton H. Hall, New York City, for plaintiff-appellee.

Robert M. Saltzstein, Brooklyn, N. Y. (Jack L. Kroner and Howard Schulman, New York City, on the brief), for defendants-appellants.

Before LUMBARD, Chief Judge, and HAYS and MARSHALL, Circuit Judges.

LUMBARD, Chief Judge:

Defendants — officers of the Atlantic, Gulf, Lakes and Inland Waters District of the Seafarers International Union of North America — appeal from an order enjoining them from excluding plaintiff, John J. Cole, from the rights of union membership. Cole was expelled for making derogatory remarks concerning the union officers in a resolution offered at a union meeting. He brought suit in the District Court for the Eastern District of New York, alleging violation of his right of free speech as secured by § 101 (a) (2) of the Labor-Management Reporting and Disclosure Act of 1959, 29 U.S.C. § 411(a) (2). Jurisdiction was based on § 102 of the Act.

Cole sought an injunction pendente lite restoring him to membership in the union. Judge Dooling, after a hearing in which he considered affidavits and the documentary evidence purportedly supporting the union's action, found that defendants had infringed plaintiff's rights under § 101(a) (2) of the Act. He also found that they had violated § 101(a) (5), which requires a union to give adequate notice and a fair hearing to a member before disciplining him. Accordingly, he granted the requested injunction. We affirm the judgment of the district court.

The resolution offered by Cole at the regular meeting of the union on August 6, 1962 consisted for the most part of a series of "Whereas" clauses which enumerated alleged instances of undemocratic actions and short-sighted policies on the part of the union officers. Cole's expulsion was based on two of these:

"Whereas, moral arguments fabricated to justify SIU\'s interference in interunion beefs are both contradictory and phony — a classic example being our current picketing of American Export ships because the Company proposes to man its Isbrandtsen vessels with licensed members of the Brotherhood of Marine Officers — we have simply to jog our memories slightly to recall that Paul Hall stole those same engineers jobs from MEBA in 1951, when he set BME up as a dual organization;

"Whereas, raiding a duly certified bargaining agent\'s contractual jurisdiction was also the cause of Moormac\'s recent tie-ups, the pattern for such organizational hijacking was instituted on the Lakes more than a year ago when Paul Hall effectively argued that Lachlan Macleay\'s transfer to Gulf Canal Line justified SIU in undercutting NMU\'s daily wage rate from $28.46 to $17.50, and its manning scale from 11 men to 7 in order to gain representational power, and by his timely intervention in another NMU labor management relationship, where Mississippi Barge Line of St. Louis was replaced by a dummy corporation, Inland Towers of Davenport (La.), the change of unions in this raid was allowed to be excused on the grounds of a similar wage slash plus reduction of the crew of the Valley from 17 to 11 men."

These allegations were followed by several specific proposals for changes in hiring procedures for union members.

Cole was charged with violation of a union rule proscribing "deliberate and unauthorized interference or deliberate and malicious vilification with regard to the execution...