Section 25 Tree Fruits (1964)?Product Boycott Doctrine

• Library: Employer-Employee Law 2008

Before 1964, the NLRB took the position that all secondary consumer picketing was unlawful. The Supreme Court rejected this view in NLRB v. Fruit & Vegetable Packers & Warehousemen, Local 760 (Tree Fruits), 377 U.S. 58 (1964), in which the union had a dispute with a packager of Washington State apples and picketed a retail supermarket, urging customers not to purchase the apples. The NLRB determined that this picketing violated NLRA § 8(b)(4)(B), 29 U.S.C. § 158(b)(4)(B), because the literal language of the section, as well as legislative history, indicated that consumer picketing at a secondary site was prohibited. The Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia denied enforcement of the NLRB’s order. The Supreme Court affirmed and spelled out the legal limits of such consumer picketing:

When consumer picketing is employed only to persuade customers not to buy the struck product, the union’s appeal is closely confined to the primary dispute. The site of the appeal is expanded to include the premises of the secondary employer, but if the appeal succeeds, the secondary employer’s purchases from the struck firms are decreased only because the public has diminished its purchases of the struck product. On the other hand, when consumer picketing is employed to persuade customers not to trade at all with the secondary employer, the latter stops buying the struck product, not because of a...