yellow-dog contract

n.
An employer-employee contract, no longer legal, by which the employee agrees not to join a union while employed.

Employment Contract expressly prohibiting the named employee from joining Labor Unions under pain of dismissal. Most state constitutions guarantee the right to union affiliation and to collective bargaining. Federal and state statutes now generally declare that such contracts will not form the basis for legal or Equitable remedies.

Were used by employers during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to keep their employees from joining labor unions. Such contracts made it a condition of employment that the worker not belong to any union. Under such agreements, union membership was grounds for dismissal. In operation, yellow dog contracts coerced workers into staying out of unions; a prospective employee contracted on this condition or lost the chance to work. Labor organizers deeply resented these agreements and labeled them “yellow dog” (i.e., contemptible) contracts. To assist the union movement, Congress and many state legislatures outlawed yellow dog contracts, but in Adair v. United States (1908) and Coppage v. Kansas (1915), the Supreme Court, relying on the freedom of contract doctrine, struck down both state and federal bans on the contracts. During the New Deal era, Congress and state legislatures revived the prohibitions. The Norris‐LaGuardia Anti‐Injunction Act of 1932 declared such agreements contrary to public policy and unenforceable in federal courts. By adopting “little Norris‐LaGuardia acts,” various industrial states copied this restriction on yellow dog contracts. In 1935 the National Labor Relations Act, which forms the basis of modern labor law, recognized an employee's right to join a union. It also labeled interference with this right as an unfair labor practice. Today, therefore, yellow dog contracts are implicitly outlawed.

— Richard F. Hamm

"Yellow-Dog Contract," an agreement signed by a worker promising not to join a union while working for a company. Beginning during the period of Labor unrest in the 1870s, companies used these agreements to prevent unions from securing a base in their firms. By the 1890s, labor advocates had secured laws prohibiting "yellow-dog" contracts in fifteen states, and, in 1898, Congress passed the Erdman Act, which outlawed "yellow-dog" contracts in the railroad industry.

As unions attempted to expand in the twentieth century, use of "yellow-dog" contracts increased, especially after the Supreme Court overturned the Erdman Act in 1908 (Adair v. United States) and a similar state law in 1915 (Coppage v. Kansas). In 1917, the Supreme Court further ruled (Hitchman Coal and Coke Company v. Mitchell) that injunctions could be issued against unions trying to organize workers who had signed "yellow-dog" contracts. The use of these agreements, which spread rapidly after the Hitchman decision, hampered the growth of unions in such industries as coal, shoe, glass, full-fashioned hosiery, clothing, metal trades, and commercial printing trades.

With the 1932 NOrris–la Guardia Anti-Injunction Law, Congress declared that "yellow-dog" contracts conflicted with public policy and that the courts could not enforce them. After the passage of the Wagner Act in 1935, the National Labor Relations Board ruled that employers were engaging in an unfair labor practice to demand that workers sign such an agreement. As a result of these two actions, the "yellow-dog" contract disappeared from the labor scene.

Bibliography

Seidman, Joel I. The Yellow Dog Contract. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1932.

Steinfeld, Robert J. The Invention of Free Labor: The Employment Relation in English and American Law and Culture, 1350– 1870. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991.

This entry contains information applicable to United States law only.

An employment agreement whereby a worker promises not to join a labor union or promises to resign from a union if he or she is already a member.

Until the 1930s, employers were able to use a variety of measures to prevent employees from joining labor unions. One of the most effective was the yellow dog contract, which frequently forced employees to either sign an agreement not to join a union or be fired. Courts upheld the legality of yellow dog contracts and frequently struck down state laws that sought to outlaw them. The enactment of the Wagner Act in 1935 (29 U.S.C.A. § 151 et seq.) finally put an end to these types of agreements.

The U.S. Supreme Court's hostility to efforts by government to outlaw the yellow dog contract was rooted in the concept of "liberty of contract." Near the end of the nineteenth century, the Court used the due process provisions of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution to strike down federal and state laws regulating business. These amendments provide that no government was to "deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law." The Court interpreted this prohibition to include the negotiating of terms of employment between an employer and an employee.

Therefore, in Adair v. United States, 208 U.S. 161, 28 S. Ct. 277, 52 L. Ed. 436 (1908), the Court struck down a federal law that protected union members by prohibiting yellow dog contracts and the discharge or blacklisting of employees for union activities. In his majority opinion Justice John Harlan presumed that there was equal bargaining power between an employer and an employee, and that the law was an unreasonable intrusion on personal liberty and property rights, as guaranteed by the Fifth Amendment.

When Kansas enacted a law prohibiting yellow dog contracts, the Court declared the law unconstitutional under the Fourteenth Amendment as an infringement of freedom of contract. Coppage v. Kansas, 236 U.S. 1, 35 S. Ct. 240, 59 L. Ed. 441 (1915).

The Wagner Act of 1935 gave employees the right to join unions and to bargain collectively with their employers. Congress outlawed the yellow dog contract and other unfair labor practices on the part of employers, finding that these practices were contrary to public policy. Existing yellow dog contracts were declared unenforceable by the courts. The Supreme Court's upholding of the constitutionality of the Wagner Act in NLRB v. Jones & Laughlin Steel Corp., 301 U.S. 1, 57 S. Ct. 615, 81 L. Ed. 893 (1937), meant the end of the yellow dog contract.

See: labor law; substantive due process.