Wirtz v. Local 153, Glass Bottle Blowers Ass'n
| Decision Date | 16 December 1966 |
| Docket Number | No. 15759,16048.,15759 |
| Citation | 372 F.2d 86 |
| Parties | W. Willard WIRTZ, Secretary of Labor, United States Department of Labor, Appellant, v. LOCAL 153, GLASS BOTTLE BLOWERS ASSOCIATION OF the UNITED STATES AND CANADA, AFL-CIO (GBBA). |
| Court | U.S. Court of Appeals — Third Circuit |
Robert V. Zener, Dept. of Justice, Civil Division, Appellate Section, Washington, D. C. (John W. Douglas, Asst. Atty. Gen., Gustave Diamond, U. S. Atty., Morton Hollander, Howard J. Kashner, Attys., Dept. of Justice, Washington, D. C., on the brief), for appellant.
Albert K. Plone, Camden, N. J. (Jubelirer & Savage, Pittsburgh, Pa., and Plone, Tomar, Parks & Seliger, Camden, N. J., on the brief), for defendant-appellee.
Before McLAUGHLIN, KALODNER and HASTIE, Circuit Judges.
Section 402(b) of the Labor-Management Reporting and Disclosure Act of 1959, 73 Stat. 519, 534, 29 U.S.C. § 482 (b), provides in part that whenever the Secretary of Labor's investigation of a complaint made by a member of a local union gives him probable cause to believe that rights to be a candidate or to vote in an election of union officers, or to hold union office, as protected by section 401(b) and (e) of the Act, have been violated, the Secretary "shall * * * bring a civil action against the labor organization * * * to set aside the invalid election * * *." This is such an action. The complaint filed in March, 1964, alleges that, through investigation of a complaint by a union member, the Secretary has found probable cause to believe that Glass Bottle Blowers Local 153 violated section 401(b) and (e) of the 1959 Act in its 1963 nomination and election of union officers. The complaint asks for a judgment "declaring the election held by the defendant union on October 18, 1963, to be null and void" and "directing the conduct of a new election under the supervision of the plaintiff".
After pretrial procedures extending over more than a year, the case was tried to the district court without a jury. In August, 1965, the court filed an opinion and caused judgment to be entered dismissing the complaint. The court found that the union's international constitution and local by-laws unlawfully restricted the eligibility of members to be candidates for union office. However, it also found that the evidence did not establish that this violation "may have affected the outcome" of the 1963 election, a requirement which section 402(c) expressly makes prerequisite to the judicial granting of relief.
The Secretary appealed from this judgment. However, while this appeal was pending, he also sought and obtained from this court an order remanding the cause to the district court, without relinquishing jurisdiction for the review of the original judgment, for the purpose of entertaining and adjudicating a post-judgment motion for further relief.
Upon remand, the Secretary filed a post-judgment motion alleging under oath that the union had elected new officers on October 12, 1965 under the same restrictions upon eligibility for office that had been the subject of the complaint with reference to the 1963 election and asking that the 1965 election be invalidated and a new election ordered under the Secretary's supervision. The court denied this motion, ruling on the merits of the motion "that no candidate or candidates for union office were deterred or disqualified from being candidates by reason of application of said regulations".
The case is now before us upon separate appeals from the original judgment and from the order denying the post-judgment motion.
We hold that the 1965 election of officers, as disclosed in the post-judgment motion, made the original action challenging the 1963 election moot. This question has very recently been considered and decided by the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. Wirtz v. Local Unions 410, 410A, 410B, & 410C, Int'l. Union of Operating Engineers, 1966, 366 F.2d 438. That court reasoned as follows:
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U.S. v. Clark
...350, 355 (R.I.1978); Wirtz v. Local 153, Glass Bottle Blowers Ass'n, 244 F.Supp. 745, 747 (W.D.Pa.1965), vacated on other grounds, 372 F.2d 86 (3d Cir. 1966), rev'd, 389 U.S. 463, 88 S.Ct. 643, 19 L.Ed.2d 705 (1968).See also Wolman v. Walter, 433 U.S. 229, 251, 97 S.Ct. 2593, 2607, 53 L.Ed.......
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...& 2 colored, 2 sergeants at arms, 1 colored and 1 white." The district court, relying on our decision in Wirtz v. Local 153, Glass Bottle Blowers Ass'n, 372 F.2d 86 (3 Cir.1966), originally dismissed the action as moot because a later election had meantime intervened. When the Supreme Court......
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...was pending, a regular election was held in 1965 under the same eligibility requirements. See Wirtz v. Local 153, Glass Bottle Blowers Ass'n, 372 F.2d 86, 88 (3 Cir. 1966) (opinion below). The Court of Appeals held that the new election of 1965, concerning which no complaint had been made, ......
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