et al. Glidden Company v. Zdanok

The circuit court case established that workers have seniority rights at other plants in addition to the one where they originally worked. The Supreme Court decision established that U.S. Court of Claims judges were entitled to sit on the circuit court.

Glidden Company v. Zdanok, et al. is one of those cases in which the procedures of the courts are just as important as the actual subject of the case. The history of the Glidden case began in 1957 when the Durkee Famous Foods Division of the Glidden Company closed a plant in Elmhurst, Queens (one of the five boroughs of New York City). Soon after, Durkee opened a new plant in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.

The Durkee plant in Elmhurst had been unionized, and workers there had established seniority rights. Seniority means that decisions about who to lay off are based not on the preference of the manager, but on the length of time someone had been working at the plant. The workers who have been at the plant the longest are the last to be laid off and the first to be rehired.