Frank Schmidt Planing Mill Co. v. Mueller

• Decision Date: 07 October 1941
• Docket Number: No. 25875.,25875.
• Citation: Frank Schmidt Planing Mill Co. v. Mueller, 154 S.W.2d 610 (Mo. App. 1941)
• Parties: FRANK SCHMIDT PLANING MILL CO. v. MUELLER et al.
• Court: Missouri Court of Appeals

154 S.W.2d 610

FRANK SCHMIDT PLANING MILL CO. v. MUELLER et al.

No. 25875.

St. Louis Court of Appeals. Missouri.

October 7, 1941.

Rehearing Denied October 24, 1941.

Appeal from Circuit Court, City of St. Louis; John W. Joynt, Judge.

"Not to be reported in State Reports."

Action by the Frank Schmidt Planing Mill Company against Julius Mueller, president of the District Council of the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners of America for the City and County of St. Louis and vicinity, and others for an injunction restraining defendants from proclaiming or enforcing a boycott of plaintiff's products. From a judgment dissolving a temporary injunction and dismissing the petition, plaintiff appeals. Transferred from the Supreme Court, 147 S.W.2d 670.

Affirmed.

Sullivan, Reeder, Finley & Gaines, of St. Louis, for appellant.

Grimm, Mueller & Roberts, of St. Louis, for respondents.

BENNICK, Commissioner.

This is a suit for an injunction to restrain defendants, who are the officers, agents, and members of the District Council of the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners of America for the City and County of St. Louis and vicinity, from proclaiming or making effectual an alleged boycott of the products of plaintiff, Frank Schmidt Planing Mill Company, which has its mill or plant at 2736 Victor Street, in the City of St. Louis, and is engaged in the manufacture and sale, within the territorial jurisdiction of the District Council comprising the City and County of St. Louis and the adjoining counties of Missouri, of a general line of millwork and cabinetwork for use in the erection of buildings.

This case is part and parcel of the controversy involved in Crescent Planing Mill Co. v. Mueller, 234 Mo.App. 1243, 123 S.W. 2d 193, in which a decree awarding the plaintiff therein a permanent injunction against the same defendants was reversed by this court and the cause remanded with directions to the trial court to enter judgment in favor of the defendants, dismissing the plaintiff's petition. A third suit, brought by Carondelet Manufacturing Company seeking injunctive relief against the defendants on its own account, was tried, by agreement of counsel, contemporaneously with and upon the same record as the case at bar; and its decision, under such circumstances, will necessarily abide the result which is reached in the case before us.

The District Council, which is composed of delegates selected from the ten local unions within its territory, is a voluntary association constituting the governing or administrative body for such local branches of the national union, the members of which are craftsmen of the building trades employed both in the milling and manufacture, and in the erection and installation, of the types of woodwork over which the union claims and asserts jurisdiction.

It was shown that plaintiff, Frank Schmidt Planing Mill Company, is one of some twenty odd mills in the St. Louis territory which have always operated on the basis of open shop, that is, without regard for the union affiliations of their employees, and without discrimination being made as between those who did, and those who did not, belong to the union. So likewise is Carondelet Manufacturing Company an open shop mill, as was also the Crescent Planing Mill Company, the plaintiff in the first of this series of cases which reached this court some time ago.

As a matter of fact, at the beginning of this controversy between the mills and the unions, only four or five mills in the entire St. Louis territory operated on the basis of closed shop, by which is meant that they employed only such persons as were members of the union in good standing; paid their employees the union wage scale (a minimum of sixty-five cents an hour); and conducted their businesses according to union regulations and trade rules enacted by the union to govern all classes of work within its jurisdiction. The open shop mills, on the other hand, paid their employees an average wage substantially less than the union scale, and particularly so in the case of Carondelet Manufacturing Company, where it was admitted that a recognition of the union would have required an increase of wages to every employee save one of from ten to twenty cents an hour.

It was also shown that contractors and builders constituted the principal customers of the mill companies, and that the products of the mills were customarily sold on the basis of competitive bidding on the part of the companies in response to specifications submitted by the contractor or builder who was about to undertake a particular job. It was further shown that labor cost was usually figured at about forty per cent of the total cost of the finished product, the obvious implication being that nonunion mills paying less than the union wage scale for both regular and overtime work were thereby afforded an advantage in such competitive bidding over the union mills operating in the same territory and employing only members of the union paid at the minimum union wage of sixty-five cents an hour.

In 1935, in order to remedy this situation and to promote what it regarded as the best interests of its members, the union set out upon an active but peaceable campaign to unionize those mills within its territorial jurisdiction which were operating on the basis of open shop. An essential step in the campaign was to induce the nonunion employees of such mills to become members of the union; and to this end the District Council stationed agents around the plants, who handed out dodgers or handbills to the employees, inviting them to attend meetings of the union and to join at an initiation fee of $5.40 instead of the fee of $50 which would be charged after the first of the following year. As a result of this campaign, ten of the fifteen employees of Frank Schmidt Planing Mill Company joined the union, while all seven of the millwork men employed by Carondelet Manufacturing Company became members of it and left their employment, as also did the union employees of Frank Schmidt Planing Mill Company, when a strike was subsequently called in the open shop mills.

Along with the attempt being made to induce the employees of the open shop mills to become members of the union, and as a further effective step towards bringing about the unionization of all the mills, the District Council, in June, 1935, promulgated a trade rule, theretofore regularly adopted by the great majority vote of all the members in the district, that from and after January 1, 1936, members of the union would not handle or erect millwork that did not bear the union label indicative of the fact that such millwork had been manufactured by members of the organization. Such rule, incidentally, was merely an amendment or revision of a trade rule of several years' standing, which, in like fashion, had forbade members of the union from handling cabinetwork that did not bear the union label; and notice of the extension of the rule to millwork was promptly given to all contractors and architects employing members of the union, with a later notice transmitted to mill owners engaged in the manufacture of millwork to be affected by the rule.

Subsequent to January 1, 1936, the effective date of the rule, the District Council began the enforcement of it; and it was undisputed that there were instances where contractors who employed union carpenters, but had previously bought their millwork from some one of the open shop mills so that it bore no union label, had their operations temporarily interfered with because of the union's insistence upon adherence to the rule. However, upon the contractor's verbal agreement, which was obtained without difficulty in practically every case, that he would purchase no millwork in the future that did not bear the union label, further interference with the job would cease, and the carpenters would be permitted to erect the nonunion millwork which the contractors had on hand at the time the rule became effective. In no instance was there a general strike called by the union with respect to the operations of a contractor; and if it happened, as it sometimes did, that all further progress of the entire job was stopped for the time being, it was only so (as was pointed out in the Crescent Planing Mill Company case) because the nature of the particular job was such that no further steps could be taken towards the completion of the project until after the millwork had been installed.

It was the action of the union in enacting and enforcing the trade rule in question which forms the basis of the charge of boycott, in that, with such rule in existence, contractors and builders employing union carpenters, while not so ordered by the union, were nevertheless, in practical effect prevented from purchasing millwork from any of the open shop mills unless such mills should elect to forego their policy of open shop and enter into a working agreement with the union so that their products might thenceforth bear the union label. It was shown that prior to the effective date of the rule, from fifty to seventy-five per cent of the business of Frank Schmidt Planing Mill...