1. Why did the NLRB decline jurisdiction?
2. According to the Court, to which body did Congress entrust the administration of national labor policy?
3. What is the basic premise behind the Court’s holding that the state courts must yield to federal law?
4. Does the failure of the Board to define the legal significance under the NLRA of a particular activity give the states the power to act?

[A union picketed an employer seeking an agreement by which the employer would retain only those workers who were union members or who applied for union membership within 30 days. The employer sought an injunction and damages in state court, both of which were granted. Concurrently, proceedings had been instituted before the NLRB. The Board, however, declined jurisdiction because the amount of interstate commerce involved did not meet its monetary standards. On appeal, the state supreme court held that since the NLRB declined jurisdiction, the state courts had power over the dispute. The case reached the Supreme Court, which remanded it. On remand, the state supreme court set aside the injunction but sustained the award of damages. Once again the case was appealed to the Supreme Court.]

FRANKFURTER, J….

In determining the extent to which state regulation must yield to subordinating federal authority, we have been concerned with delimiting areas of potential conflict; potential conflict of rules of law, of remedy, and of administration. The nature of the judicial process precludes an ad hoc inquiry into the special problems of labor-management relations involved in a particular set of occurrences in order to ascertain the precise nature and degree of federal-state conflict there involved, and more particularly what exact mischief such a conflict would cause. Nor is it our business to attempt this. Such determinations inevitably depend upon judgments on the impact of these particular conflicts on the entire scheme of federal labor policy and administration. Our task is confined to dealing with classes of situations. To the National Labor Relations Board and to Congress must be left those precise and closely limited demarcations that can be adequately fashioned only by legislation and administration. We have necessarily been concerned with the potential conflict of two law-enforcing authorities, with the disharmonies inherent in two systems, one federal, the other state, of inconsistent standards of substantive law and differing remedial schemes. But the unifying consideration of our decisions has been in regard to the fact that Congress has entrusted administration of the labor policy for the Nation to a centralized administrative agency, armed with its own procedures, and equipped with its specialized knowledge and cumulative experience.

Congress did not merely lay down a substantive rule of law to be enforced by any tribunal competent to apply law generally to the parties. It went on to confide primary interpretation and application of its rules to a specific and specially constituted tribunal and prescribed a particular procedure for investigation, complaint and notice, and hearing and decision, including judicial relief pending a final administrative order. Congress evidently considered that centralized administration of specially designed procedures was necessary to obtain uniform application of its substantive rules and to avoid these diversities and conflicts likely to result from a variety of local procedures and attitudes towards labor controversies…. A multiplicity of tribunals and diversity of procedures are quite as apt to produce incompatible or conflicting adjudications as are different rules of substantive law….

When it is clear or may fairly be assumed that the activities which a State purports to regulate are protected by Section 7 of the National Labor Relations Act, or constitute an unfair labor practice under Section 8, due regard for the federal enactment requires that state jurisdiction must yield. To leave the states free to regulate conduct so plainlywithin the central aimof federal regulation involves too great a danger of conflict between power asserted by Congress and requirements imposed by state law. Nor has it mattered whether the states have acted through laws of broad general application rather than laws specifically directed towards the governance of industrial relations. Regardless of the mode adopted, to allow the states to control conduct which is the subject of national regulation would create potential frustration of national purposes.