Photo Credit: Stephanie Keith / Greenpeace
A jury in North Dakota jury recently ordered the environmental nonprofit Greenpeace to pay pipeline corporation Energy Transfer more than $660 million dollars for defamation and other claims connected to protests at the Dakota Access pipeline in 2016-17.
The decision represents a direct threat to unions and other groups that oppose corporate policies, opening the door to ruinous suits for anyone accused of “defaming” a corporate opponent. Brian Hauss, a senior staff attorney with the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, said that the lawsuit serves as a “tax on speech,” one that makes it too expensive to go against “litigious, deep-pocketed corporations.”
“If companies can sue critics, advocates and protesters into oblivion for their speech and the unlawful acts of third parties, then no one will feel safe protesting corporate malfeasance.
“When the civil rights movement used economic boycotts against segregationist businesses segregationists retaliated with civil lawsuits against groups such as the NAACP, trying to frame their activism as a conspiracy.”
Such attacks can have a devastating effect on unions. Perhaps the most famous example is the 1908 Danbury Hatters Case, which held unions and even individual union members subject to enormous damages based on harm done to employers by their secondary boycotts. The decision not only devastated the hatters union, but effectively outlawed the secondary boycott, one of labor’s most powerful weapons at the time.
For more on the Greenpeace decision:
https://www.theguardian.com/