Lechmere, Inc. v. NLRB

Lechmere, Inc. v. National Labor Relations Board, 502 U. S. 527 (1992), is a US labor law case of the Supreme Court of the United States on union rights and private property rights. It forbids nonemployee union organizers from soliciting support on private property unless no reasonable alternatives exist.

Lechmere, Inc. owned a retail store in a shopping plaza in Newington, Connecticut, a metropolitan area near Hartford, and it also was part owner of the plaza's parking lot. Employees of Lechmere, Inc. who drove to work used the lot to park their vehicles during their shifts. The parking lot was separated from a public highway by a strip of land that was almost entirely public property. Local union organizers, not employees of Lechmere, Inc., attempted to organize Lechmere employees by placing promotional handbills on the windshields of cars parked in the employee area of the lot. Lechmere then denied the organizers access to the lot. This act caused the organizers instead to distribute their handbills from the aforementioned strip of public land between the lot and the highway. Local 919 of the United Food and Commercial Workers filed an unfair labor practice charge to the NLRB (the National Labor Relations Board), claiming that Lechmere had violated §7 of the NLRA (the National Labor Relations Act) by barring them access to the parking lot. The applicable language of the law cited was the guarantee of the NLRA that employees have "the right to self organization, to form, join, or assist labor organizations" (§7) and that it is an unfair labor practice for an employer "to interfere with, restrain, or coerce employees" in exercising their §7 rights. The NLRB affirmed the union's grievance, and the Court of Appeals enforced the NLRB's decision.

After the decision, the Court of Appeals remanded the case to the NLRB to consider whether the Lechmere Company had violated Section 8(a)(1) by directing the non employee union organizers to leave the public grassy area. The NLRB reaffirmed its previous ruling, holding that "the Supreme Court's vindication of the [employer's] private property rights, if anything, elevates the gravity of [the employer's] attempt to bar union access to public property."