the issue in this case is really whether this court should second guess the labor management committees decision the way walks claims were arbiter bl under the party's collective bargaining agreement and i want to start by briefly discussing the limited scope of review that this court generally applies to labor arbitration wards this court gives virtually unparalleled deference to the decisions of labor  and in this is the supreme court stated in the major league baseball case the question in reviewing a labor arbitration award is if the arbitrator is even arguably construing or applying the contract and you had authority to decide the issue before then the court must affirm the award even if the court is convinced that the arbitrator made serious legal error and as as this court stated in the white hamster's case the question is is when you're reviewing it an arbitration award from a labor arbitrator this court asks whether the labor arbitrators interpreted the contract not whether they interpret it correctly and here there's no question that the labor can't practice on the right decision i don't know if it overruled the right decision but that it made right not directly or clearly a political to preclude arbitration of there's a few different questions the question of whether for example right and fourteen pain plaza apply to labor code claims is a question that has not been addressed by any binding authority the your position is  does not necessarily apply to labor violations well i will read this court in the powell decision defined right this way and i understand powell is a published decision so it's not presidential but it's relied on by the plants extensively it says interpreter right the court said we will not interpret a collective bargaining agreement to waive an individual employees right to litigate statutory discrimination claims unless the c b a waiver explicitly incorporates stat and anti discrimination requirements but discrimination claims are very different than labor code claims then than wage and hour claims and if you look at right and particularly in fourteen penn plaza where you have a majority in a dissent and you look at the dispute between the majority and dissent in that case turned largely on the dispute is about whether or not the union can waive the judicial forum for anti discrimination claims and that and the dispute turns on the specific anti discrimination statutes in that case they were not considering labor code violations and i will note that in in wage and hour cases the california labor code allows the collective bargaining agreement to trump the labor code sometimes and so with the labor code sort of sets a standard and then says but if the parties have a collective bargaining agreement the standard i want to be sure we're talking about same thing here the right case i'm talking about of the united states  case that's correct and it is published well ok i was reading from the powell decision of this court interpret in the right to say ok course i might as well i was asking a question about whether the labor management board here was aware of the united states supreme court case of right and i after that that question is absolutely yes ok they knew that they knew that and while just to clarify what i was talking about is what is the scope of writing fourteen and plaza in order to vacate the award under a manifest disregard of federal law standard which by the way i think the real standard here is of the one that applies to labor arbitration awards which is an even narrower scope of review but if we step into the manifest disregard of the last name the question is what is the is there a an explicit well defined and clearly a political law the was ignored by the labor management committee and so you we have to ask ourselves what is the scope of right for  you know is that if the supreme court of the united states has handed down opinion and it hasn't been interpreted by a court of appeal or another supreme court opinion that an arbitration body is free to interpret it  whatever way it wishes and it would not be bound by it in any other way it interpret ing the law is not ignoring the law your honor i think that's right they're arbitrators are empowered to make legal mistakes even as this court said in the white interest case serious legal mistake you agree that they made a legal mistake here not at all or i think i think in this case well they didn't they didn't explain themselves well that they explained their i mean how do we how do we go that way and if they'd said we're distinguishing right because this is a wage claim and right involved discrimination claims you know i spot your argument but i don't see right anywhere in their decision well i think a couple answers that question you know you have to look at in a collective bargaining context the parties agree to have industry practitioners the representative of the union and the representative of management adjudicate their claims are not form of lawyers they're not former judges where you would expect their opinion to bear the earmarks of a judicial opinion but of course arbitrators or not even the law required to provide written justifications for the rules and they can't manifest disregard the law on the subtle that for a manifest disregard they have to recognize the applicable law which was tendered to them by the petitioner and then if they and then they have to ignore well the find explicit and clearly applicable law and is it too much to ask that even a labor board would explain why they think the united states supreme court case was not applicable well i think you have to  it may or may not be too much asked but the question is is that grounds for vacating an award and in order to vacate the ward the court must find that the law is well defined explicit and clearly political and my point is that the law here just simply isn't so an arbitrator is not required to provide justification in this case the arbitrators did provide some justification for it the what we don't know what do you think the best case then would for that proposition would be that right is distinguishable i think it's distinguishable on on three ground what what case u s supreme court or circuit case would you point to that would dispute that would is the ninth circuit decision and the white seems to case mamma says that that historic practice can provide clear and convincing evidence of an agreement to arbitrate arbitrement but it's still the clear  standard hawaii teamsters says that the party's historic practices become part of the governing contract as if that was an explicit term that there as there is binding on the labor arbitrators as if this contract was explicit and so the historic practice is there those cases bolster the point that right and fourteen penn plaza do not clearly  apply to preclude arbitration of way walks kind of the second point would be a labor code this is labor code violations are very different than the stay at statutory anti discrimination claims brought in  fourteen pump laws and right and while there's not an a case that explicitly says well labor code claims that right fourteen plus i don't apply to labor code claims the point is that there's no clearly a political law that says right and fourteen p do apply to those claims and so that the labor management committee cannot be accused of ignoring a law that doesn't exist and so i gather your your response to my call even if you're a labor law scholar you like it right it doesn't apply here you need to worry about it don't you're saying i think that's right you are that right fourteen pence they can look now whether this court would agree with that or not is not the question because this court the labor arbitrators are able to make legal there that but they're allowed to look at that say look those those cases were in a different context and they're not therefore clearly a political to the context before so i know your position that it doesn't apply but let's just say that as a matter rather they clearly did apply but the labor management team said you know this is doesn't apply and they just say they just flat out wrong are they still protected if they if they looked at right and fourteen penn plaza and they made an interpretation of those cases that they didn't apply even if this court thinks that interpretation is wrong the labor management committees decision is what the parties bargained for clearly and explicitly in the in the contract and so this this court cannot vacate in a war based on legal error even serious there on the face of an award it has to be you know that they looked at the law they knew it applied and they said that we don't follow what one of there had been a say a district court  declaratory relief action asking the district court to tell this labor management committee that right applies with they then still be free to ignore what the district court said about the meaning of right w answer that question it deferred to the arbitrator's decision on that question so even on that question whether or not they would be bound by law of the case would ultimately be a question put to the labor management committee the bitch who the labor management team in your view is like philosopher kings and greece right they can make it up and do whatever they want well that's i think that's not true here are they they are arbitrators that have experience with absolute power because they can design a can is they can apply it however they want they can interpret and apply the law and even if they make error in doing so they're not subject to or philosopher kings well that that the parties agreed to appoint them as the interpreters of the law and i want to make one more you know ri was all matters are covered ford said that's not specific enough you're sol all grievances are covered you know that seems to seems like a pretty close parallel certainly that was important to the district court here that the breadth of the provision still needed some additional specificity to waive statutory claims well so there's a couple that seems like a pretty close parallel to write a couple of responses that the right remember right  said that while that language was ambiguous it was really from the ambiguity created in right was based on that language that said anything outside the contract is not in the contract so any historical practices anything like that did not become part of the contract and so by saying all grievances and disputes the court said any clarity that that might have had was denied clarity by this further language that is absent from our collective bargaining agreement well my second one will say many of your time is up to you but it's  claims we know that they ignored the right standard because when you look at the labor management committees arbiter ability determination they tell us the standard that they did apply and that standard was one that they created on their own it asked whether the wage claims for time spent in training or essentially claims for unpaid hours worked under the c p a why isn't that argue arguably construing the language of the collective bargaining agreement and on you know i mean they don't say right that the inference is that they distinguish right because these are wage claims and right involves discrimination claims on the tree you can make that inference from this record i understand counsel says that's their position but i think i read somewhere that the deference to arbitrators is ninety not quite philosopher kings about the widest known to man right but they cannot ignore or ma would they have been within their proper bounds to decide the way they did well perhaps your honor but we did notify them and i understand i'm just kind of your stand the mechanism here in other words i gather ignoring the law but here they did know and that's important in our calculation is that right correct your honor i point the court to the second circuit's decision in two fair go excited on page sixteen of our brief where the cards that the court says in determining an arbitrator's awareness of the law courts impute to the arbitrator knowledge of governing law identified by the parties to the arbitration so knowledge of right is an puter to the labor management committee it's undisputed that they received and even if that's a question of law in fact we believe it's still reviewed under the clearly erroneous standard because it's essentially a factual inquiry and i point the court to the ninth circuit on bank decision and united states versus hinks by right well we know it requires an explicit statement we know we don't have that here that the cases seem to suggest that you have to somehow explicitly say that the arbiter has the power to decide statutory claims the second circuit has i believe said that you actually have to explicitly list the statutes six circuit i think it said similar language this circuit has not issued a published decision yet it has the powell decision which is unpublished  but all of the other circuits have considered this sort of the right case have required an explicit statement and they've come out and said broad language that may be in the individual employment context not the collective bargaining context that may be to apply to them are aware that they're waving a statutory right at that point it just seems like a really a form over substance argument substantively the the c v a as you know they exist for wages and compensation and right maybe you're thinking about title seven and the americans with disability act you know these federal discrimination claims that seems that's that's all for far far afield from a wage based claim like you have here and this isn't that of at least an arguably plausible way to construe right that the committee could have engaged him i don't think they did consider right so i i would answer no to that but i would point the court to the seventh circle that they might still this is the name of stumbled on the standard was not additionally what opposing counsel is attempting to do is to say because the words clear and unmistakable were used in that context a completely different context that definition should be grafted on rights definition of clear and unmistak if the committee had said we've looked at right that deals with discrimination this case doesn't we think it's distinguishable that would've been ok with perhaps perhaps but they didn't do that so you're saying that the fact that they just ignored it for purposes of their response is damning to what they did well that but also that we know they applied a different standard because we can look at the language that they use and they ask a different question they ask whether the c b a contains an explicit statement that statutory claims are virtual they asked whether the claims alleged are essentially unpaid claims under the c p a they converted statutory claims to contractual claims we don't have any contractual claims said that past practice is part of the c b s but that's not the dispositive issue here the issue is can past practice constitute an explicit statement to arbitrate statutory claims and this court precedents say accused of ignoring a law that doesn't exist they say that it must be explicit but no case has said that historic practices can't satisfy the clear unmistakable san standard nobody says it can either but it's an open dispute ok so a neutral court who was not party to the arbitrator the collective bargaining agreement is tasked with its interpretation and the court says because we don't know what the parties intended all we have is the agreement we're going to require some clear and unmistakable statement but it's the question here is you have the parties have agreed to have the very parties the very persons who negotiated and signed this agreement they come together they're tasked with its interpretation they come together and say based on both you know they based on their historic practice of arbitrating every one of these types of claims over the uninterrupted history of this collective bargaining agreement and the decision in this case they say these