Tisdale v. United Ass'n of Journeymen and Apprentices of Plumbing and Pipefitting Industry of U.S. and Canada, Local 704

• Decision Date: 09 June 1994
• Docket Number: No. 92-2433,92-2433
• Citation: 25 F.3d 1308
• Parties: 146 L.R.R.M. (BNA) 2615, 64 Fair Empl.Prac.Cas. (BNA) 1785, 65 Empl. Prac. Dec. P 43,278, 62 USLW 2780, 128 Lab.Cas. P 11,165 Donald C. TISDALE and Larron E. Hughes, Plaintiffs-Appellants, v. UNITED ASSOCIATION OF JOURNEYMEN AND APPRENTICES OF the PLUMBING AND PIPEFITTING INDUSTRY OF the UNITED STATES AND CANADA, LOCAL 704, Defendant-Appellee.
• Court: U.S. Court of Appeals — Sixth Circuit

Page 1308

25 F.3d 1308

146 L.R.R.M. (BNA) 2615, 64 Fair

Empl.Prac.Cas. (BNA) 1785,

65 Empl. Prac. Dec. P 43,278, 62 USLW 2780,

128 Lab.Cas. P 11,165

Donald C. TISDALE and Larron E. Hughes, Plaintiffs-Appellants, v. UNITED ASSOCIATION OF JOURNEYMEN AND APPRENTICES OF the PLUMBING AND PIPEFITTING INDUSTRY OF the UNITED STATES AND CANADA, LOCAL 704, Defendant-Appellee.

No. 92-2433.

United States Court of Appeals Sixth Circuit.

Argued Dec. 9, 1993.

Decided June 9, 1994.

James K. Fett (argued), Douglas B. Shapiro (briefed), Ypsilanti, MI, for plaintiffs-appellants.

J. Douglas Korney, Korney & Heldt, Birmingham, MI, (argued and briefed), for defendants-appellees.

Before: MERRITT, Chief Judge; SUHRHEINRICH, Circuit Judge; and WELLFORD, Senior Circuit Judge.

MERRITT, Chief Judge.

This appeal requires us to apply the holding in Caterpillar, Inc. v. Williams, 482 U.S. 386, 107 S.Ct. 2425, 96 L.Ed.2d 318 (1987), concerning federal removal jurisdiction in federal labor preemption cases. The two plaintiffs before us seek to transfer from a union local in Toledo, Ohio, to the defendant union local in Detroit, Michigan. They filed state race discrimination claims in state court under Michigan's Elliott-Larsen Civil Rights Act, ¹ alleging that the Detroit local refused to allow them to transfer because they are black. No federal claims are alleged in the complaint, and there is no diversity of citizenship. Nevertheless, the district court allowed the local union to remove the action to federal court under 28 U.S.C. Sec. 1441 because the defendants rely as a defense upon a provision of the international union's constitution which disallows such transfers from one local to another unless the member establishes local residency. ² The district court reasoned that doctrines of federal labor preemption arising under Sec. 301 of the Taft-Hartley Act ³ make removal appropriate whenever the court's adjudication of the case will involve interpretation of a labor contract or union constitution.

In the Caterpillar case the underlying issue was whether an individual employment contract applied, as plaintiff-employees contended, or a federal collective bargaining agreement created a federal defense, as claimed by the defendant-employer. The Supreme Court disallowed removal to the federal court of plaintiffs' action under state law for breach of the individual employment contract even though the employer's main defense required an interpretation of the collective bargaining agreement. The Court reasoned that "the presence of a federal question, even a Sec. 301 question, in a defensive argument does not overcome the paramount policies embodied in the well-pleaded complaint rule--that the plaintiff is the master of the complaint, that a federal question must appear on the face of the complaint, and that the plaintiff may, by eschewing claims based on federal law, choose to have the cause heard in state court." Caterpillar, 482 U.S. at 398-99, 107 S.Ct. at 2433.

In the instant case, it is the union's defense which raises the likelihood that the trial court will have to interpret the union constitution. As in other cases in which a defendant asserts a defense based on a federal constitutional, statutory, or administrative provision, the state court may have to interpret some text affected by federal law. But this neither invokes removal jurisdiction nor divests the state court of its normal authority to adjudicate a case that contains an issue touching upon federal law. We therefore conclude that the district court erred when it did not apply Caterpillar 's principles of judicial federalism, and we reverse the judgment allowing removal of the action under Sec. 1441.

There has been considerable confusion in this area of the law, and we well understand how the district court and the parties might misinterpret the way the legal principles in this area fit together. We therefore outline in further detail our understanding of the development of the law.

* * * * * *

Plaintiffs are members of Local 669 of the International Plumbers and Pipefitters Union in Toledo. They applied for transfer to Local 704, which covers four counties in the vicinity of Detroit. Both plaintiffs met all requirements for transfer except residency; at the time of their applications they still lived in Toledo. Plaintiffs requested that the residency requirement be waived, but the Detroit local denied their applications. Plaintiffs claim that they suffered racially disparate treatment at the hands of the Detroit local, which has a number of white members who do not reside in the four-county Detroit area. They allege that the Detroit local gave residency waivers to these white members but refused the same to the black plaintiffs.

The union's defense is that the union constitution requires residency for entry into a local union but contains no requirement that a duly admitted member of a local union be stripped of membership if he or she later moves out of the local's geographical area.

Federal labor law is said to "preempt" state claims which fall within the ambit of the Taft-Hartley Act on the ground that the maintenance of relative peace between labor and management nationwide requires uniform interpretation of collective bargaining agreements. Lingle v. Norge Div. of Magic Chef, 486 U.S. 399, 404, 108 S.Ct. 1877, 1880, 100 L.Ed.2d 410 (1988); Teamsters v. Lucas Flour Co., 369 U.S. 95, 103-4, 82 S.Ct. 571, 576-77, 7 L.Ed.2d 593 (1962). "[T]he preemptive force of Sec. 301 is so powerful as to displace entirely any state cause of action 'for violation of contracts between an employer and a labor organization.' Any such suit is purely a creature of federal law, notwithstanding the fact that state law would provide a cause of action in the absence of Sec. 301." Franchise Tax Board v. Construction Laborers Vacation Trust, 463 U.S. 1, 23, 103 S.Ct. 2841, 2853, 77 L.Ed.2d 420 (1983).

The Supreme Court has extended Sec. 301 beyond claims founded directly on rights created by collective-bargaining agreements to reach state-law tort claims which are " 'substantially dependent on analysis of a collective-bargaining agreement.' " Caterpillar, 482 U.S. at 394, 107 S.Ct. at 2430 (quoting Int'l Bhd. of Elec. Workers v. Hechler, 481 U.S. 851, 859 n. 3, 107 S.Ct. 2161, 2167 n. 3, 95 L.Ed.2d 791 (1987)). See also Allis-Chalmers Corp. v. Lueck, 471 U.S. 202, 213, 105 S.Ct. 1904, 1912, 85 L.Ed.2d 206 (1985) (court ruling on preemption must focus on "whether evaluation of the [state-law] claim is inextricably intertwined with consideration of the terms of the labor contract").

The Court has also extended Sec. 301 to cover intra-union agreements, including union constitutions. United Ass'n of Journeymen v. Local 334, 452 U.S. 615, 627, 101 S.Ct. 2546, 2553, 69 L.Ed.2d 280 (1981). It is now clear that an individual union member may bring a suit under Sec. 301 against a union to enforce a union constitution. Wooddell v. Int'l Bhd. of Elec. Workers, --- U.S. ----, ----, 112 S.Ct. 494, 499, 501, 116 L.Ed.2d 419 (1991).

Neither United Ass'n of Journeymen nor Wooddell are removal cases, nor does either raise an issue of preemption nor state that Sec. 301 gives the federal courts exclusive jurisdiction over suits to enforce union constitutions. The Court's language in Wooddell echoes that used in earlier cases to the effect that labor contracts need to be uniformly interpreted nationwide, ⁴ however, and we think it fair to say that intra-union matters are now preempted on the same terms as are labor-management matters.

At the same time, Sec. 301 does not preempt every suit involving unionized employees or their unions or divest state courts of their normal jurisdiction. The Supreme Court's unanimous decisions disallowing preemption in Caterpillar and Lingle confirm this. Federal law has monopolized certain aspects of labor relations, but where a suit does not center on the terms of a labor contract (collective bargaining agreement union constitution, or other) it is not preempted because it is not within the arena of labor relations which Congress has nationalized:

Section 301 does not ... require that all "employment-related matters involving unionized employees" be resolved through collective bargaining and thus be governed by a federal common law created by Sec. 301. The Court has stated that "not every dispute concerning employment, or tangentially involving a provision of a collective-bargaining agreement, is preempted by Sec. 301 or other provisions of the federal labor law." Allis-Chalmers Corp. v. Lueck, 471 U.S. 202, 211, 105 S.Ct. 1904, 1911, 85 L.Ed.2d 206 (1985). Claims bearing no relationship to a collective bargaining agreement [or, now, union constitution] beyond the fact that they are asserted by an individual covered by such an agreement are simply not pre-empted by Sec. 301.

Caterpillar, 482 U.S. at 396 n. 10, 107 S.Ct. at 2431 n. 10.

Moreover, federal preemption does not change the procedural rules governing removal:

[T]he presence of a federal question, even a Sec. 301 question, in a defensive argument does not overcome the paramount policies embodied in the well-pleaded complaint rule--that the plaintiff is the master of the complaint, that a federal question must appear on the face of the complaint, and that the plaintiff may, by eschewing claims based on federal law, choose to have the cause heard in state court. When a plaintiff invokes a right created by a collective-bargaining agreement, the plaintiff has chosen to plead what we have held must be regarded as a federal claim, and removal is at the defendant's option. But a defendant cannot, merely by injecting a federal question into an action that asserts what is plainly a state-law claim, transform the action into one arising under federal law, thereby selecting the forum in which the claim shall be litigated. If a defendant could do so, the plaintiff would be master of nothing. Congress has long...