Brotherhood of Railway and Steamship Clerks Freight Handlers Express and Station Employees v. Florida East Coast Railway Company’s Empirical Analysis
1966
Citation profile
176 federal appellate · 68 district · 12 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 400 later decisions (25 by the Supreme Court) — most recently November 2017 · most notably Atlantic Coast Line Railroad v. Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers (1970), Brotherhood of Railroad Trainmen v. Jacksonville Terminal Co. (1969)
176 federal appellate · 68 district · 12 state decisions
Later decisions citing this case, by decade. The current decade is in progress, and our corpus holds fewer opinions from the most recent years, so the latest bars are undercounted — not a real decline.
Appellate journey
reviewedFlorida East Coast Railway Co. v. Brotherhood of Railroad Trainmen (from Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals)
Relationships
Applies 29 U.S.C. § 108 (Norris-LaGuardia Act) · 45 U.S.C. § 152 (Railway Labor Act) · 45 U.S.C. § 155 (Railway Labor Act) · 45 U.S.C. § 156 (Railway Labor Act) · 45 U.S.C. § 160 (Railway Labor Act)
Relies on Steele v. Louisville & Nashville Railroad · Elgin Ry Co v. Burley · Virginian Ry Co v. System Federation No 40 · National Labor Relations Board v. Brown · Order of Railroad Telegraphers v. Railway Express Agency, Inc.
Most-quoted passages
The sentences later courts lift from this opinion, ranked by how many decisions quote each — the parts of the opinion doing the work. These counts are smaller than the citation total above because most of the 400 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“[T]he procedures of the Act are purposely long and drawn out, based on the hope that reason and practical considerations will provide in time an agreement that resolves the dispute.”
12 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“[t]hese collective bargaining agreements are the product of years of struggle and negotiation; they represent the rules governing the community of striking employees and the carrier. That community is not destroyed by the strike, as the strike represents only an interruption in the continuity of the relation. Were a strike to be the occasion for a carrier to tear up and annul, so to speak, the entire collective bargaining agreement, labor-management relations would revert to the jungle. A carrier could then use the occasion of a strike over a simple wage and hour dispute to make sweeping changes in its work-rules so as to permit operation on terms which could not conceivably have been obtained through negotiation. Having made such changes, a carrier might well have little incentive to reach a settlement of the dispute that led to the strike. It might indeed have a strong reason to prolong the strike and even break the union. The temptation might be strong to precipitate a strike in order to permit the carrier to abrogate the entire collective bargaining agreement on terms most favorable to it. The processes of bargaining and mediation called for by the Act would indeed become a sham if a carrier could unilaterally achieve what the Act requires be done by the other orderly procedures.”
6 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“make only such changes as are truly necessary in light of the inexperience and lack of training of the new labor force or the lesser number of employees available for the continued operation. The collective bargaining agreement remains the norm; the burden is on the carrier to show the need for any alteration of it, as respects the new and different class of employees that it is required to employ in order to maintain that continuity of operation that the law requires of it.”
5 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority
How this case has been treated — in progress
Whether each later court followed, distinguished, criticized, or overruled this decision. The treatment classification (task #35) runs highest-cited cases first and lights up here as it reaches this one.