Adair v. United States: Supreme Court Strikes Down Federal Ban on Yellow-Dog Contracts

The Supreme Court struck down Section 10 of the Erdman Act, which prohibited railroads engaged in interstate commerce from requiring workers to sign “yellow-dog contracts” - agreements not to join labor unions as a condition of employment. Justice John Marshall Harlan, who had dissented in Lochner, wrote for the 6-2 majority that the law violated employers’ Fifth Amendment liberty of contract and exceeded Congress’s commerce power.

The case arose when Louisville and Nashville Railroad supervisor William Adair fired O.B. Coppage for belonging to the Order of Locomotive Firemen. Congress had passed the Erdman Act in 1898 specifically to prevent such firings, recognizing that yellow-dog contracts effectively destroyed workers’ ability to organize. The Court held that “the right of a person to sell his labor upon such terms as he deems proper is in its essence the same as the right of the purchaser of labor to prescribe the conditions upon which he will accept such labor.”

Justices McKenna and Holmes dissented, with Holmes arguing that contracts between employers and employees are not truly voluntary when workers have no realistic alternatives. The decision complemented Lochner in constructing a constitutional framework that protected employer power while denying workers meaningful freedom. Yellow-dog contracts remained legally enforceable until the Norris-LaGuardia Act of 1932. The Adair decision exemplifies how the Supreme Court’s formalistic “freedom of contract” doctrine masked profound inequality, treating the power to fire someone for union membership as equivalent to a worker’s power to quit. This judicial capture by laissez-faire ideology would persist for three decades.