Hiring law survives challenge

PORTLAND — Regulations on companies’ hiring of replacement workers during strikes survived a court challenge Thursday, as the state’s highest court threw out a judgment that said federal law invalidated the Maine law.

The Maine Supreme Judicial Court said the lawsuit brought by Hayden Brook Logging Inc. was not an appropriate case for reviewing the strikebreakers law. A Portland attorney who represents management in labor disputes predicted the battle will be fought again.

“I’m very disappointed in it, and we remain firm in our belief that the state law is unconstitutional,” said Peter Bennett, who represented Hayden Brook, of Fort Kent. “I believe it leaves the labor unions of the state of Maine with a powerful weapon that could be used to disable an employer,” Bennett said.

Assistant Attorney General Paul Stern, who represented the state in its defense of the law, was not immediately available for comment, according to a receptionist in his office.

Although Bennett was confident that the law will face another test, he was not sure whether the challenge will come from Hayden Brook, an Aroostook County company with only about 10 employees.

“Unfortunately, my client was the first to be harmed by this statute,” he said.

The 1988 state law prohibits employers from having potential replacement workers come in for job interviews at workplaces that are being struck.

The law, designed to reduce the possibility of violence as applicants cross picket lines, requires employers to find separate locations to do its hiring of replacement workers and also to tell county and municipal law enforcers 10 days in advance where the hiring will be done.

Bennett believes the law gives labor an unfair advantage, because employers are never given 10-day notices before strikes are staged. The law also unfairly tells employers what they can and can’t do with their work sites, he said.

The Hayden Brook case was filed after a brief strike by its handful of loggers.

The company considered the possibility of hiring replacement workers by telephone, but after management made a final offer, the union accepted and the strike was called off after two weeks, Bennett said.

Hayden Brooks then went to court to try to show that the Maine law was unconstitutional, and Superior Court Chief Justice Morton Brody issued a declaratory judgment that said the National Labor Relations Act pre-empted the state statute.

But the supreme court justices said that the Hayden Brook case was not an appropriate case for determining the merits of the replacement workers law, so it ordered the lower court’s action dismissed.