Dowd v. International Longshoremen’s Association

For years, Florida grapefruit had been shipped to Japan out of two Florida ports, Fort Pierce and Port Canaveral, pursuant to agreements between American exporters and Japanese importers. Coastal Stevedoring Company (Coastal) and Port Canaveral Stevedoring Limited (Canaveral) operated out of the two ports. The International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA) (defendant), a labor union, was engaged in a labor dispute with Coastal and Canaveral due to the companies’ use of nonunion labor to load Japan-bound grapefruit shipments. The ILA requested the assistance of three Japanese dockworker unions (the Japanese unions) in ILA’s labor dispute with Coastal and Canaveral to pressure participants in the citrus trade to exclusively use union labor and, specifically, for members of the Japanese unions to refuse to unload any products that had been loaded by Coastal and Canaveral, which the ILA was picketing. In response, the Japanese unions requested that Japanese importers ensure that fruit they purchased had been loaded by union labor and threatened that Japanese union workers would not unload fruit that had been loaded by nonunion labor in the United States. The Japanese importers conveyed these circumstances to Florida grapefruit exporters. One ship was immediately diverted from Coastal’s port, where it would have been handled by nonunion labor, to Tampa, and thereafter Canaveral and Coastal did not handle another shipment of grapefruit bound for Japan. The National Labor Relations Board (the board) (plaintiff) filed a petition for injunction in district court alleging that ILA had unlawfully coerced or restrained neutral persons to cease doing business with Coastal and Canaveral in violation of the National Labor Relations Act. The district court granted a temporary restraining order against ILA until the matter could be adjudicated. The Eleventh Circuit was called on to decide whether the board had jurisdiction over the matter.