Washington Terminal Co. v. Boswell

• Decision Date: 18 November 1941
• Docket Number: No. 7465.,7465.
• Citation: 124 F.2d 235,75 US App. DC 1
• Parties: WASHINGTON TERMINAL CO. v. BOSWELL et al.
• Court: U.S. Court of Appeals — District of Columbia Circuit

75 US App. DC 1, 124 F.2d 235 (1941)

WASHINGTON TERMINAL CO. v. BOSWELL et al.

No. 7465.

United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia.

Decided November 18, 1941.

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Mr. John Dickinson, of Philadelphia, Pa., with whom Mr. Henry L. Walker, of Washington, D.C., was on the brief, for appellants.

Mr. Frank L. Mulholland, of Toledo, Ohio, with whom Messrs. Willard H. McEwen, of Toledo, Ohio, and William E. Willis, of Washington, D. C., were on the brief, for appellees.

Before STEPHENS, MILLER, and RUTLEDGE, Associate Justices.

RUTLEDGE, Associate Justice.

The Declaratory Judgments Act, 48 Stat. 955, was enacted June 14, 1934.¹ One week later the Railway Labor Act, Act of June 21, 1934, 48 Stat. 1185, 45 U.S.C.A. § 151 et seq., was passed. The latter established the National Railway Adjustment Board for settlement of disputes arising under collective agreements between the carriers and their employees. The Board's awards are not enforceable by it. But awards in favor of employees may be enforced by suit in the district courts begun within two years from accrual of the causes of action under them. 45 U.S.C.A. § 153, First (p), (q).

In such a suit the Act gives the employee definite and substantial advantages. Id. (p). It does not expressly make the enforcement suit exclusive of others to determine rights arising under collective agreements. The question in this case is whether it has done so impliedly, as to a carrier and employees who have utilized the adjustment procedure and procured an award. Stated otherwise, the issue is whether a carrier, which has been unsuccessful before the Board, can maintain a suit for a declaratory judgment of rights under the original collective agreement during the two years which the Act allows for the employees' enforcement suit. We think the answer should be negative, and therefore the District Court was right in dismissing the complaint of the carrier, appellant here.

The decision in Moore v. Illinois Central R. Co., 1941, 312 U.S. 630, 61 S.Ct. 754, 85 L.Ed. 1089, rendered since this case was argued, has put beside the point much of the argument here. The case held that the Railway Labor Act does not preclude an employee from bringing a suit for damages for alleged wrongful discharge contrary to a collective agreement. The plaintiff employee, however, had begun his suit before the administrative machinery had been set in motion. The decision establishes that in such circumstances the Act has neither excluded the general jurisdiction of the courts nor made exhaustion of the administrative remedy prerequisite to its exercise, for decision of controversies which might be determined by the statutory method. At the threshold of controversy accordingly, the disputants have alternate routes which they may follow. One is entirely judicial, without regard to the Railway Labor Act. The other is administrative and judicial, according to its terms.

But the Moore case neither presented nor decided the question whether, when one party has put the adjustment procedure in operation, the other may disregard it entirely and at any subsequent stage have a judicial determination of the issues other than that provided by the Act. From the fact that either party may go directly into court in the beginning for relief independent of the statute, it does not follow that he or the other may short-circuit the administrative proceeding while it is in progress or the statutory enforcement suit during the two years allowed for bringing it.² That is true, whether the matter be regarded as involving the existence of jurisdiction in the courts independently of the Act or merely sound judicial discretion in its exercise.

In this case the dispute arose under a collective agreement made February 1, 1923, between the plaintiff carrier and two labor unions,³ which represented the employees who are the defendants. The agreement fixed seniority rights and other terms of employment of enginemen and firemen. In 1934 defendants asserted they were entitled under the agreement to perform certain work which others previously had done. This consisted chiefly in moving empty passenger cars from the storage yard to the Union Terminal Passenger Station in Washington, D. C., and vice versa, preceding and following, respectively, the departure and arrival of trains on interstation runs. The regular train crews had done and still do this work. They are employees of the railroads — called the tenant lines — which use the station's terminal facilities.

Plaintiff rejected defendants' claim. Thereafter they invited it to make a joint submission of the dispute to the Board. Plaintiff declined. But, as the Act entitled them to do,⁴ defendants submitted it. Plaintiff thereupon appeared in the proceedings and made full submission on the merits in accordance with the statutory provisions.⁵

The Board, acting by its First Division, deadlocked. A referee was appointed as the Act requires in such an event and, with his participation, the Board's award was made October 24, 1938. It held that the contract entitled the employees to perform the work in question. The same day the Board ordered the employer to make the award effective within thirty days. Plaintiff has not complied. Instead, on December 29, 1938, it filed this suit. It was begun, therefore, slightly more than one month from the day on which the employees' cause of action arose on the award, although the Act gave them two years to sue upon it and made no provision for an employer's suit to set it aside or restrain its enforcement.⁶

I.

The suit asks for an adjudication of rights under the original contract. It seeks also a declaration that the Board's award and order are void. Whether or not the issues in suit and those of the administrative proceeding are identical in all respects,⁷ they are so to the extent that each involves the question whether the collective agreement, rightly interpreted, gives the employee defendants the right to do the work in dispute. That is the fundamental issue presented in both. The effect, therefore, of a declaratory judgment favorable to plaintiff would be to nullify the award. Consequently this suit is essentially one to review it. Whether the judgment were in plaintiff's favor or otherwise, allowing the suit to be maintained would deprive the employees of the special advantages which the Act confers upon them in the enforcement suit.

We do not think that Congress intended the Board's awards to be reviewable in this manner. The Railway Labor Act makes no provision for review as such. But it does set forth a definite and special scheme for securing judicial determination that the award is or is not in accordance with the legal rights of the parties. If the scheme is adequate constitutionally, as we think it is, we do not believe Congress intended that it should be circumvented by free resort to other forms of judicial review or determination de novo of the merits of the controversy.

If Congress had made no provision for judicial review, in the broad sense we have indicated, the general applicability of the Declaratory Judgments Act, adopted almost simultaneously, might be regarded as supplying the omission. But the matter was not an omitted one. This is shown conclusively by the presence in the Railway Labor Act of the detailed plan for review. It is shown further by the character of the plan's details. We think these things show, too, that the method of review provided was intended to be exclusive. If Congress had intended the Declaratory Judgments Act to be generally available to the parties, regardless of the fact that an award had been made and of its terms, there could have been no substantial reason for including in the Railway Labor Act the complex and detailed provisions for the enforcement suit or, for that matter, any special method of review. More especially, there could have been no such reason for writing into the statute the unusual and highly important special advantages given to the employee seeking enforcement.

Congress intended these advantages to mean something. They mean nothing if such a suit as this can be maintained. They are very substantial advantages. They are conferred by Section 3, First (p) of the Act, 45 U.S.C.A. § 153, First (p), which is set out in full below.⁸ Their purpose and effect, as will be seen, is to equalize the burden, financial and otherwise, of extended litigation as between employees and the carriers. The Act contemplates suits by individual employees as well as by labor unions. It recognizes the unequal financial position of the litigants when a railway laborer pits his strength against his employer's in court. Whatever may be true of unions, individual employees do not maintain corporate legal departments, sustained by revenues derived from the public. They cannot charge off attorneys' fees to business expense. Often their own resources would be inadequate to secure competent counsel. The relief sought often does not include recovery of money, so that a contingent fee payable only from the proceeds of recovery or the employee's resources frequently would not be attractive. Congress recognized this inequality and undertook to reduce it. Hence, the Act provides for recovery of an attorney's fee, if the employee is successful in the suit. 45 U.S.C.A. § 153, First (p). Costs of litigation alone are prohibitive, particularly to laboring people suing as individuals. Hence the petitioner in an enforcement suit is exempted from their payment, except those that accrue upon his appeal. Situs of litigation may be highly important, also as a matter of expense, to the complaining employee. Hence he may sue where he resides or where the carrier's principal operating office is located. Choice of venue in litigation which is unequal because of the financial advantage of the other party may mean the difference between asserting one's...