Hodgson v. Local 1299, United Steelworkers of America

• Decision Date: 29 December 1971
• Docket Number: No. 71-1293,71-1297.,71-1293
• Parties: James D. HODGSON, Secretary of Labor, Plaintiff-Appellant-Cross-Appellee, v. LOCAL 1299, UNITED STEELWORKERS OF AMERICA, AFL-CIO, and United Steelworkers of America, AFL-CIO, Defendants-Appellees-Cross-Appellants.
• Court: U.S. Court of Appeals — Sixth Circuit

453 F.2d 565 (1971)

James D. HODGSON, Secretary of Labor, Plaintiff-Appellant-Cross-Appellee, v. LOCAL 1299, UNITED STEELWORKERS OF AMERICA, AFL-CIO, and United Steelworkers of America, AFL-CIO, Defendants-Appellees-Cross-Appellants.

Nos. 71-1293, 71-1297.

United States Court of Appeals, Sixth Circuit.

December 29, 1971.

COPYRIGHT MATERIAL OMITTED

Michael H. Stein, Dept. of Justice, Washington, D. C. (L. Patrick Gray, III, Asst. Atty. Gen., Walter H. Fleischer, Atty., Dept. of Justice, Washington, D. C., Ralph B. Guy, Jr., U. S. Atty., Detroit, Mich., on the brief), for Hodgson.

Carl B. Frankell, Pittsburgh, Pa. (Michael H. Gottesman, Washington, D. C., Allen J. Kovinsky, Detroit, Mich., on the brief), for Local Union, etc., and others; Bernard Kleiman, Chicago, Ill., of counsel.

Before PHILLIPS, Chief Judge, and McCREE and MILLER, Circuit Judges.

McCREE, Circuit Judge.

This appeal presents difficult questions concerning the requirement of the Landrum-Griffin Act that a union member exhaust all internal union remedies before the Secretary of Labor can entertain his complaint that provisions of the Act relating to union elections have been violated. We are also presented with questions concerning the scope of the remedial and supervisory powers over elections conferred on the Secretary by the Act. For the reasons set out below, we affirm in part and reverse in part the judgment of the District Court.

At the 1964 International Convention of the United Steelworkers of America, AFL-CIO (Steelworkers), the delegates approved an amendment to the International Constitution. The Constitution had provided that terms of office in each local would be two years, and that in order to be eligible to run for local office, a member must have attended at least one-half the local membership meetings over a two-year period. In 1962, the terms of office were lengthened to three years, and the 1964 amendment reflected this change by requiring as a condition for eligibility for local office that a member have attended one-half the meetings over a three-year period. An exemption was provided for members whose union activities or working hours prevented attendance.

Following the June 1967 series of Steelworkers local elections,¹ the Secretary of Labor, acting pursuant to §§ 401 and 402 of the Labor Management Reporting and Disclosure Act of 1959 (LMRDA), 29 U.S.C. §§ 481, 482,² filed eight lawsuits, including this one, in which he sought to set aside local elections on the ground, among others, that the Constitution's meeting-attendance rule imposed an unreasonable qualification on a member's right to run for union office.³ Three of these suits ultimately went to trial, and in all three the District Court found the meeting-attendance rule reasonable. However, in Hodgson v. Local Union 6799, United Steelworkers of America, AFL-CIO, 403 U.S. 333, 91 S.Ct. 1841, 29 L.Ed.2d 510 (1971), the Supreme Court held that the District Court should not have reached the issue of the reasonableness of the rule since that issue had not been raised by any member in the union's internal procedures. Accordingly, there had been no exhaustion of remedies as required by LMRDA § 402(a) (1).

This appeal concerns an election of officers of the 9,000-member Steelworkers Local 1299. Of the 67 candidates originally nominated for the 11 offices in the local, 22 eventually decided to run. The local's election committee then determined that three of the 22 were ineligible to run for office because of the meeting-attendance rule, which the committee interpreted to require attendance at 12 of 23 local meetings.⁴

The election was held June 28, 1967. Subsequently, several members lodged internal union protests concerning the conduct of the election. One group of protests—the "Stevenson" group—charged irregularities in a recount conducted on August 1, 1967, of the votes for treasurer and grievanceman. No mention was made of the meeting-attendance rule in these protests. The local denied the protests on August 2, 1967, and the International Executive Board Branch on October 10, 1967, affirmed the determination that no violations had occurred in the recount.

The other protests were made by Robert Morgan and Donald Gianni, candidates for division grievanceman. They were declared ineligible to run under the meeting-attendance rule because neither had attended at least 12 of the 23 meetings preceding the election. They claimed that the local officials had misread the language of the union's Constitution and by-laws and had not given those documents their "fullest meaning."⁵ At trial, they testified in substance that they were protesting the election committee's decision to exclude from consideration the first 13 months of the three-year period preceding the election⁶ for purposes of applying the meeting-attendance rule. Both asserted that they would have been eligible for election if the committee had applied the meeting-attendance rule literally.⁷ The Morgan-Gianni protests were rejected by the local on August 2, 1967, and by the International Executive Board on October 10, 1967.

On November 6, 1967, the Stevenson group filed with the Secretary a complaint alleging violation of the LMRDA in the recount procedures. After conducting an investigation of the entire election (and receiving a waiver from the union of the 60-day limit contained in LMRDA § 402(b)), the Secretary, through his delegate, notified the Steelworkers on January 9, 1968, that he had probable cause to believe that the June 1967 election of officers of local 1299 violated LMRDA §§ 401(c), (e), and (g) in the following respects: ballots were altered between the initial vote and the recount; members in good standing were denied the right to be candidates and to hold office because of the application of the Steelworkers' meeting-attendance rule; and union funds were used in various ways to promote the candidacy of incumbent officers.

The Steelworkers responded to this notification by reversing the earlier decision to disallow the Stevenson protests and ordering a new election for the positions of treasurer and grievanceman. On February 24, 1968, the Secretary was notified of this decision and was assured that the election would be held as soon as possible.

On March 1, 1968, the Secretary filed suit in the United States District Court to set aside the June 1967 election. The complaint alleged four violations of LMRDA § 401: members in good standing were denied the right to be candidates and to hold office by the "imposition of unreasonable qualifications in violation of section 401(e)"; members were denied a reasonable opportunity to nominate, vote for, or otherwise support candidates of their choice, in violation of section 401(e); adequate safeguards to insure a fair election were not provided, in violation of section 401(c); and union funds were used to promote the candidacy of certain persons in violation of section 401(g). The Secretary requested that the June 1967 election be declared null and void in its entirety and that a new election be conducted "for all offices under the supervision of the plaintiff."

Defendants admitted the violation of section 401(c), which concerned the recount that was the subject of the Stevenson protests. They contended, however, that this violation was remedied by an election held April 18, 1968; that the Secretary had notice before he filed suit that this election was to be held; and, therefore, that the Secretary did not have jurisdiction to litigate this issue because the violation was remedied before he instituted his lawsuit. Defendants further contended that the Secretary could not litigate the other violations alleged on the ground that "said matters were not made the subject of protest within the union," as required by LMRDA § 402(a) (1).

The District Court held that the admitted violation of section 401(c) could not be remedied after the Secretary's institution of litigation "by the union's running of a special, unsupervised election," on the authority of Wirtz v. Local 153, Glass Bottle Blowers Association of the United States and Canada, AFL-CIO, 389 U.S. 463, 88 S.Ct. 643, 19 L.Ed. 2d 705 (1968). With respect to the section 401(g) charge, the court held that the union had been put on notice by the Secretary during his investigation, that the union had time to correct any irregularity, and that the exhaustion requirement of the LMRDA was thus satisfied. The court then found that section 401 (g) had not been violated.

Finally, the court held that the issues raised under section 401(e) had been properly raised and exhausted by the Morgan-Gianni protest and that the Secretary could properly include these issues in his complaint even though the Stevenson group, which invoked his jurisdiction, had alleged only violations of section 401(c). Further, the Morgan-Gianni protests were held to have exhausted both the issue whether the meeting-attendance rule was uniformly and properly applied and the issue whether the rule itself imposed an unreasonable qualification on a member's eligibility to run for office. The court then ruled that the meeting-attendance requirement was not an unreasonable qualification and that the rule had been "uniformly imposed."

The court entered an order dismissing the portions of the Secretary's complaint charging violations of sections 401(e) and (g), and requiring an election to be held for the office of treasurer "under the supervision of the secretary." The Secretary then requested an order allowing him to supervise both the nominating and balloting aspects of the new election. The court denied this request on the ground that the Secretary's complaint sought relief with respect to the section 401(c) violation only for irregularities occurring in the balloting process. Accordingly, he held that the Secretary was only entitled to "supervise that portion of the election for which his complaint sought relief, namely the...