The Emporium Capwell Case: Race, Labor Law, and the Crisis of Post-War Liberalism

Abstract

This article is a detailed historical exploration of the 1975 United States Supreme Court case Western Addition Community Organization v. Emporium Capwell. In this case, the Court held that the National Labor Relations Act does not allow African American workers who are represented by a labor union to bypass that union in order to bargain about issues of racial discrimination directly with their employer. Using archival source materials as well as oral histories of some of the participants, the article chronicles the litigation from its inception in San Francisco in 1968, through its adjudication before the National Labor Relations Board, the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, and the Supreme Court. It argues that the conflict that emerges within the case – between black workers’ right to combat racial discrimination and American labor law’s fundamental commitment to workplace majoritarianism – reflects a broader conflict within the legal and political culture of the late 1960s. American liberalism, the article suggests, was severely weakened by its inability to reconcile its commitments to both racial egalitarianism and progressive wealth redistribution. The Emporium Capwell case and the doctrine that emerged from it is thus the legal analog of the political crisis that weakened liberalism at the end of the 1960s.