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In 2002, the Independence, Missouri school board adopted new terms of employment for the employees of the school district. In so doing, the board also rescinded terms of employment previously established through agreement or understanding between the school district and its employees. The school district adopted the new terms without bargaining collectively with several employee associations representing teachers, custodians, and transportations employees who had been affected by the change.

In response to the school district’s actions, these employee associations, including the National Education Association, sued the school district for refusing to bargain with them over salaries and working conditions. The employee associations also challenged the school district’s decision to unilaterally rescind established terms of employment. 

Both sides agreed that the school district’s actions constituted a refusal to bargain collectively. The employee associations maintained that the refusal to bargain collectively was a violation of the Missouri Constitution, while the school district maintained that it was not obligated to bargain with the employee associations because the Missouri Constitution did not grant public-sector employees the right to bargain collectively. 

A Missouri trial court agreed with the school district. The court concluded that, Missouri law permitted the school district to refuse to bargain collectively with their employees, and that the school district could unilaterally rescind the existing employment agreements. The case reached the Supreme Court of Missouri, where the trial court was reversed on both counts.1

I. The Supreme Court’s Decision

Though the high court unanimously held that school districts cannot unilaterally rescind existing employment agreements, only five of the seven judges on the court agreed that the Missouri Constitution gives public-sector employees a right to bargain collectively.

The employees based their claim to a constitutional right to bargain collectively on their interpretation of Article I, Section 29 of the Missouri Constitution, which states: “employees shall have the right to bargain collectively.”2 The school district disagreed with this interpretation of Section 29, and instead pointed to Springfield v. Clouse,3 the first case to interpret Section 29. Just two years after Section 29 was adopted by Missouri voters, the Missouri Supreme Court held in Clouse that the right to bargain collectively that was expressed in Section 29 had no application in the public sector and that public-sector employees had been deliberately excluded from Section 29’s reach.4

  The school district also highlighted the fact that since Clouse the Supreme Court of Missouri has had multiple opportunities to re-examine that case as well as Section 29, and has repeatedly affirmed Section 29’s exclusive application to private-sector employees. According to the school district, the passage of time and the public’s expression of its will to distinguish between public and private sector employees for purposes of collective bargaining presented compelling reasons for rejecting the employees claim on the basis of stare decisis. 

According to the employees, the school district’s claim that Section 29 does not extend to public-sector employees is erroneous because the terms of Section 29 do not distinguish between employees in the public and private sectors. They further argued that Clouse and its progeny should be overruled to the extent those cases make that distinction. 

A majority of the Missouri Supreme Court agreed and overruled Clouse. Justice Michael Wolff , writing for the majority, stated that Clouse had rested its disparate treatment of public and private sector employees on the “now largely defunct nondelegation doctrine, which holds that it is unconstitutional for the legislature to delegate its rule-making authority to another body.” And, according to the majority, because “the nondelegation doctrine has been largely abandoned in Missouri,” Clouse’s holding that Section 29 only applies to the private sector should be overruled. 

II. Dissent and Critics of the Decision

Critics of the Missouri Supreme Court have argued that in reaching its decision to reverse Clouse and extend the right to bargain collectively to all employees, regardless of sector, the court ignored the historical context surrounding Section 29’s passage and focused almost exclusively on Clouse’s analysis of the non-delegation doctrine as it could be applied to collective bargaining. 

Judge Ray Price, joined in his dissent by Judge Stephen N. Limbaugh, Jr., took exception to the majority’s reasoning and argued that, even though the text of Section 29 does not distinguish between the public and private sectors, “the section must be read in historical context with the understanding of collective bargaining in relation to public employees that existed at the time of its adoption in 1945.”5 In other words, it was more important for the court to understand the terms “collective bargaining” as understood during the historical context surrounding the passage of Section 29 than it was to understand legal theories used by the court in Clouse to support its early interpretation of the section. 

The dissent further argued that, by putting the amendment into its proper historical context, one finds that, at the time of the amendment’s enactment by the people of Missouri, “the term ‘collective bargaining’ simply had no relation, by definition, to public employment.”6 In support of this argument, Judge Price relied on statements made by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, as well as R.T. Wood, the sponsor of Section 29 and president of the State Federation of Labor. In a letter read at the constitutional convention, President Roosevelt stated:

All Government employees should realize that the process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service. It has its distinct and insurmountable limitations when applied to public personnel management. The very nature and purposes of Government make it impossible for administrative officials to represent fully or to bind the employer in mutual discussions with Government employee organizations. The employer is the whole people, who speak by means of laws enacted by their representatives in Congress. Accordingly, administrative officials and employees alike are governed and guided, and in many instances restricted, by laws which establish policies, procedures, or rules in personnel matters. All Government employees should realize that the process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service. It has its distinct and insurmountable limitations when applied to public personnel management. The very nature and purposes of Government make it impossible for administrative officials to represent fully or to bind the employer in mutual discussions with Government employee organizations. The employer is the whole people, who speak by means of laws enacted by their representatives in Congress. Accordingly, administrative officials and employees alike are governed and guided, and in many instances restricted, by laws which establish policies, procedures, or rules in personnel matters.7

And the sponsor of Section 29, Mr. Wood, expressed similar sentiments at the convention, by stating, “I don’t believe there is anyone in the organization that would insist upon having a collective bargaining agreement with a municipality setting forth wages, hours, and working conditions.”8

The dissenting judges highlighted the fact that “[t]he decision in Clouse, that public

employees do not enjoy the right to collective bargaining under the constitution, was handed down only two years following the convention. There is no doubt the Court then knew the intent of the framers and the mood of the 1945 electorate better than the Court does now.”9

While the majority dealt with the doctrine of stare decisis by arguing that the passage of time justified a change in the law, Judge Limbaugh noted during oral argument that the fact that a single interpretation of Section 29 has existed for more than half a century “strongly dictates against overruling our longstanding precedent, especially because [Clouse] was not wrongly decided.”10 Indeed, Missourians have been debating that holding and the meaning of Section 29 from the days of the convention until now, yet the interpretation of Section 29 expressed in Clouse has been the unchanged law of Missouri for sixty years. As late as 2002 the people of Missouri declined to pass a constitutional amendment that would have given public employees the right to bargain collectively.11

Critics of the Court have stated that the most troubling aspect of the majority’s ruling, however, is the lack of specificity with which it defines the new constitutional right of public-sector employees to bargain collectively. The majority did not define what it meant by “collective bargaining,” nor did it describe how the new right differed, if at all, from Missouri’s existing labor laws, which give public-sector employees the right to “meet and confer” with employers. Because of this lack of clarity, Judge Price stated: “It seems less harm would result from leaving this longstanding procedure in place than from giving public employees a new constitutional right to ‘collective bargaining’ that the majority does not define, describes in terms similar to ‘meet and confer,’ and the application of which no one can predict.”12 

After the decision was released, Missouri Governor Matt Blunt chided the court and noted the practical effect the ruling would have: “This reckless decision could force cities and school districts to raise taxes and subject Missourians to the threat of strikes by critical public sector employees.”13 Similarly, St. Louis attorney and former general counsel of the National Labor Relations Board Jerry M. Hunter was cited by the St. Louis Post Dispatch as describing the ruling as a departure from the intended meaning of Section 29 and “one of the biggest labor decisions in recent memory in the state of Missouri.”14 It is estimated that Missouri has nearly 400,000 public-sector employees who could be affected by the supreme court’s decision, and this fact alone is sure to spark intense debate about the role of collective bargaining in the state.

*Jonathan Bunch, a former law clerk to Judge Stephen N. Limbaugh, Jr., is a graduate of the University of MissouriColumbia School of Law. 

 

Endnotes

1 Independence-National Education Association v. Independence School District, SC87980, __ S.W.3d __ (Mo. Banc 2007). The case was taken by the supreme court directly from the trial court without decision by the Missouri Court of Appeals. 

2 Mo. Const., art. I., sec. . 

3 206 S.W.2d 539, 542 (Mo. banc 1947). 

4 Id. 

5 Independence-National Education Association, SC87980, __ S.W.3d at ___ (Price, J., dissenting). 

6 Id. 

7 Clouse, 206 S.W.2d 539, 542-43 (Mo. banc 1947). 

8 Id. 

9 Supra note 5. 

10 Citing oral argument. 

11 Missouri Secretary of State, Elections, 2002 Initiative Petitions, available at http://www.sos.mo.gov/elections/2002petitions/ip 200201.asp> (last viewed 6/13/07). 

12 Supra note 5. 

13 Governor Matt Blunt, “Gov. Matt Blunt Statement on Supreme Court Ruling,” Press Release 5/29/07, available at http://gov. missouri.gov/press/Statement052907.htm (last viewed 6/13/07). 

14 Paul Hampel, Missouri Government Workers Win Right to Bargain, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 5/30/2007, available at http://www.stltoday.com/stltoday/emaf.nsf/Popup?ReadForm&db=stltoday%5Cnews%5Cstories.nsf&docid=495314B15F35DAED862572EB001343B0 (last viewed 6/13/07).

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