Facts
- Butler Shoe Company warehouse employees struck in January 1971 and picketed multiple Atlanta-area retail outlets, including a Butler store located inside the privately owned, enclosed North DeKalb Shopping Center.
- Four strikers entered the mall and picketed near the Butler store with signs.
- The shopping center’s manager told the pickets to leave and threatened arrest for criminal trespass if they remained.
- The pickets left, later returned and resumed picketing, and again departed after renewed threats of arrest.
- The union filed an unfair labor practice charge alleging the owner’s threats interfered with rights protected by § 7 of the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA).
Issues
- Whether the First Amendment gives striking employees a right to engage in peaceful picketing inside a privately owned shopping center over the owner’s objection.
- Whether the parties’ rights and liabilities are determined by First Amendment free-expression doctrine or exclusively by the NLRA’s framework for accommodating § 7 rights and private property rights.
Decision
- The Supreme Court held that the pickets had no federal First Amendment right to enter and picket within the privately owned shopping center.
- The Court held that the dispute is governed exclusively by the NLRA, not by constitutional free-speech standards.
- The Court vacated the judgment enforcing the NLRB’s order and remanded for the Board to reconsider the case under NLRA criteria alone.
Legal Principles
- The federal First Amendment does not require a private shopping center owner to permit expressive activity on the premises absent state action.
- To the extent earlier precedent treated shopping centers as the functional equivalent of municipal business districts for First Amendment access purposes, that approach was rejected as inconsistent with later controlling doctrine.
- When union or employee activity conflicts with private property interests in this setting, the governing standards arise from the NLRA.
- The NLRB must accommodate employees’ § 7 rights and private property rights with as little impairment of either as consistent with maintaining the other, subject to judicial review.
Conclusion
The Court rejected a constitutional right of access for labor picketing in a private shopping center and directed that any required access be determined solely under the NLRA’s statutory accommodation of § 7 rights and private property rights.