I’m always on the lookout for things to add to the George Orwell list of “War is Peace” double talk. So, now, comes a threat to the whole idea of winning neutrality agreements in union organizing campaigns.

For those who aren’t familiar with the terrain, union organizing efforts are hand-to-hand combat with companies because companies spare no expense in terrorizing workers who might be considering voting for a union. The way a company figures it: the costs are worth it because the penalties for being caught breaking the law are pathetically small.

So, in came the idea of a neutrality agreement. Using whatever leverage it can, a union may successfully sign an agreement with a company to be neutral. Mind you, that doesn’t mean the company is going to embrace the idea of unionization. Hardly. It usually ends up being simply a deal to use card-check — a showing of signatures from a majority of workers — to see whether workers want a union, avoiding the long drawn-out process of elections held by the government.

But, into this simple process came a dumb-ass court (story in the subscription-only Wall Street Journal):

A few federal appeals courts have held that certain assistance employers offer in connection with the agreements—such as providing unions with access to corporate property and home addresses of workers—are lawful because they are not “tangible” assistance. But the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit, based in Atlanta, last year held that such organizing assistance can be a thing of value, in violation of the law.

“Employers and unions can set ground rules for an organizing campaign, even if the employer and union benefit from the agreement. But innocuous ground rules can become illegal payments if used as valuable consideration in a scheme to corrupt a union or to extort a benefit from an employer,” the court said.

And, now, that conflict between the different decisions is headed…to the U.S. Supreme Court, which is not a friendly place for unions:

In the eight years since Chief Justice Roberts joined the court, it has allowed corporations to spend freely in elections in the Citizens United case, has shielded them from class actions and human rights suits, and has made arbitration the favored way to resolve many disputes. Business groups say the Roberts court’s decisions have helped combat frivolous lawsuits, while plaintiffs’ lawyers say the rulings have destroyed legitimate claims for harm from faulty products, discriminatory practices and fraud.

Whether the Roberts court is unusually friendly to business has been the subject of repeated discussion, much of it based on anecdotes and studies based on small slices of empirical evidence. The new study, by contrast, takes a careful and comprehensive look at some 2,000 decisions from 1946 to 2011.

Published last month in The Minnesota Law Review, the study ranked the 36 justices who served on the court over those 65 years by the proportion of their pro-business votes; all five of the current court’s more conservative members were in the top 10. But the study’s most striking finding was that the two justices most likely to vote in favor of business interests since 1946 are the most recent conservative additions to the court, Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., both appointed by President George W. Bush.

Want to wager how the Clarence Thomas gang will rule on neutrality agreements?