§ 1.1.4 LABOR'S BATTLE AGAINST THE INJUNCTION.

JurisdictionArizona

§ 1.1.4 Labor's Battle Against the Injunction. In the early part of the nineteenth century, union strikes and boycotts were, for the most part, treated by the courts as criminal conspiracies even though the motivating purpose and means utilized might have been legal if similar actions were taken by individuals.56 Many federal judges were quick to grant injunctions, with the result that use of the injunction was often abused. By the middle of the nineteenth century, injunctions and damages became the weapon of choice against unions. Unionists recognized the injunction as a principal barrier to collective bargaining.

As early as 1893, the United States Supreme Court held that strikers could not be convicted of the crime of interfering with the courts absent proof that they knew of the injunction.57 Nevertheless, injunctions in the late 1800s and early 1900s were regularly granted ex parte, the scope of the injunction was frequently loosely defined, nonparties without notice were included within the scope of the injunction, and those arrested for being in contempt of an injunction were deprived of rights normally given to criminal defendants.58 In the 1903 Bisbee strike, a federal injunction was granted forbidding anyone from using the United States mail to convey information or notice of the strike to outsiders.

Labor persuaded the national Democratic Party to adopt a plank in its 1896 platform supporting legislation limiting labor injunctions.59 After the election of 1900, the issue of labor injunctions receded nationally until 1908.60 In Loewe v. Lawlor,61 known as the Danbury Hatters Case, the United States Supreme Court approved triple damages and injunctive relief against a striking union under the Sherman Act on the basis that the strike was a restraint of trade.62 President Theodore Roosevelt recognized that something had to be done to curb injunction abuses. He proposed procedural reforms, but Labor wanted substantive reforms. Congress was more on Labor's side. At the end of his administration in 1908, President Roosevelt denounced Labor's attempts to limit the injunction as "a violent and sweeping attack upon the entire judiciary." Roosevelt stated that legislation proposed by the House Judiciary Committee would legalize "blacklisting and boycotting in every form, legalizing, for instance, those forms of the secondary boycott which the anthracite coal strike commission so unreservedly condemned."63

In his inaugural address in 1909, President William Howard Taft expressed strong opposition to limiting the federal courts' power to issue injunctions in labor disputes. He stated that "it would create a privileged class among the laborers and save the lawless among their number from a most needed remedy available to all men for the protection of their business against lawless invasion."64 President Taft's opposition to judicial recall was related to his disdain for Labor's attempts to limit injunctions and his fear of a socialist revolution.65 He feared that the judicial recall, as Labor was counting on, would pressure judges into being more reluctant to issue injunctions in organizational strikes.

The Arizona Constitutional Convention delegates clearly distrusted the judiciary.66 Labor attempted to curb the use of the injunction in two ways: by inserting a provision in the constitution barring the use of injunctions in labor disputes, and by the recall of judges that might be "injunction-happy." It failed to secure passage of the "radical" anti-injunction proposition because such a...

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