Supreme Court Applies Antitrust Law to Union Secondary Boycotts in Bedford Cut Stone

The Supreme Court rules that the Journeymen Stone Cutters Association of North America violated the Sherman Antitrust Act by declaring stone from Bedford Cut Stone Company and 23 other Indiana limestone producers “unfair” and prohibiting its 5,000 members from working on buildings using this stone. Justice George Sutherland, writing for the majority, holds that this “secondary boycott”—union members refusing to work on products from non-union companies—constitutes an illegal conspiracy to restrain interstate commerce. The case arises from a 1921 labor dispute in which Bedford-area producers refused to renew contracts with the union and organized an “independent union” at their plants, prompting the national union to invoke a constitutional provision forbidding members to work on stone “cut by men working in opposition to this association.”

Lower federal courts had refused to enjoin the union, but the Supreme Court commands the injunction, finding that the combination of 5,000 workers across multiple states refusing to handle Bedford stone directly restrains the companies’ interstate commerce. The companies had $6 million in combined investment and $15 million in annual sales, more than 75 percent in interstate commerce. Justices Louis Brandeis and Oliver Wendell Holmes dissent sharply, with Brandeis observing the Court’s double standard: when capitalists combine to control major industries, the Court finds their restraints “reasonable” under the rule of reason doctrine, but when a small union exercises its only means of self-protection by refusing to work on anti-union products, the Court discovers unreasonable restraint. Brandeis warns that if workers can be enjoined for simply refusing to work, “Congress created by the Sherman Law and the Clayton Act an instrument for imposing restraints upon labor which reminds of involuntary servitude.”

The Bedford Cut Stone decision represents a landmark application of antitrust law to union tactics, particularly secondary boycotts involving workers refusing to handle goods produced under conditions they oppose. The ruling effectively criminalizes a core labor organizing strategy: solidarity across worksites in support of workers fighting for union recognition. Combined with the 1925 Coronado Coal decision, Bedford Cut Stone establishes that virtually any union activity affecting interstate commerce exposes unions to antitrust liability, while corporations enjoy broad immunity under “rule of reason” analysis. The decision stands as precedent until the Norris-La Guardia Anti-Injunction Act of 1932 and the Wagner Act of 1935 begin to restore labor’s legal protections, though secondary boycotts remain prohibited under the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947.