The court below granted respondent Indiana and Michigan Electric Company's petition to remand the case to the Labor Board to hear additional evidence as to a course of depredations, including dynamitings, committed, it is alleged, by Local B-9 of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, on the Company's properties during the pendency of the case. It directed that the Board make findings on such evidence, include it in the transcript, and make such modifications, if any, in its order, as the evidence might require. The court expressly refrained from passing on questions as to the bias and partisanship of the Trial Examiner and the sufficiency of the findings and of the evidence raised by the Board's petition for enforcement and the answer thereto. The importance of the questions raised to enforcement of the National Labor Relations Act, 29 U.S.C.A. § 151 et seq., prompted us to grant certiorari.
For present purposes we take to be true the facts stated in the petition or offer of proof on the basis of which the court below directed a remand. These facts were stated on oath, and have not been denied. Petitioner says that we must hold that even if true they are immaterial. On this assumption of truth the case is follows:
On November 12, 1938, Samuel Guy, the Business Manager of Local B-9 of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, filed in amended form with the Board charges that the Company had been guilty of several unfair labor practices. On the same day the Board through its Regional Director issued a complaint against the Company, setting November 28, 1938, as a hearing date, and events of violence ensued in the following sequence as related to the Company's steps in defense of the case:
The Company filed its answer on November 23, 1938. On the following day, four days before the hearing, cables at one of the Company's South Bend substations were dynamited. The hearings proceeded, and the trial examiner's intermediate report recommended generally against the Company.
On September 1, 1939, the Company filed its exceptions to the intermediate report. On September 5, three of its transmission line poles were sawed off, and on September 8, a transmission line tower was dynamited. On October 17, 1939, the oral hearing on the exceptions was set before the Board at Washington for November 9, 1939. Two days later another transmission line tower was dynamited. On October 28, two transmission poles at different locations were dynamited. Another transmission tower was so destroyed on October 30, ten days before the oral hearing, and two more at different parts of the system on November 23, 1939. All carried high voltage lines, and some were located along public highways or railroad tracks.
On February 19, 1940 the Company filed with the Board a petition to reopen the case and receive further evidence. This petition alleged the commission of the depredations upon its property as set forth above and further that: John R. Marks, Assistant Business Manager of Local B-9, and Earl Freeman, one of its members, both of whom had been witnesses against the Company, and three others, were arrested after February 1, 1940, and charged with the commission of some or all of the depredations, and with having conspired to commit them all. Except Marks, each had made confessions stating that Marks paid them sums of money aggregating $2,325 for committing such acts. One of them stated that Marks had caused the first dynamiting to intimidate the Company in connection with the hearing and three stated that he had caused the later ones to intimidate it in connection with the oral argument. The Company proposed by the evidence of dynamiting to discredit Marks and Freeman, on whose testimony the Trial Examiner appeared to rely. It also sought to discredit Guy, who also had been a witness, on the claim that he knew, or must have known, of the use of the $2,325 of the Union's money for the purpose of destroying respondent's property. But it claimed more. It asserted evidence of a conspiracy to destroy property to influence the pending case, which it contended was not a good-faith labor controversy, but an unlawful effort of Local B-9 to coerce the Company to require its employees to join the union.