Document ID: s3://data.kl3m.ai/documents/govinfo/USCOURTS/USCOURTS-caDC-05-01041/USCOURTS-caDC-05-01041-0/pdf.json

Parties Involved:
Ceridian Corporation
Respondent
National Labor Relations Board
Petitioner

Document Text:

United States Court of Appeals

FOR THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA CIRCUIT

Argued October 31, 2005 Decided January 27, 2006

No. 04-1421

CERIDIAN CORPORATION,

PETITIONER

v.

NATIONAL LABOR RELATIONS BOARD,

RESPONDENT

Consolidated with

05-1041

On Petition for Review and Cross-Application for

Enforcement 

of an Order of the National Labor Relations Board

Donald W. Selzer, Jr. argued the cause for petitioner. With

him on the briefs was Joseph P. Harkins.

Jeff Barham, Attorney, National Labor Relations Board,

argued the cause for respondent. With him on the brief were

John H. Ferguson, Associate General Counsel, Aileen A.

Armstrong, Deputy Associate General Counsel, and Fred B.

Jacob, Supervisory Attorney. 

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Before: SENTELLE, GARLAND, and GRIFFITH, Circuit

Judges.

Opinion for the Court filed by Circuit Judge GARLAND.

GARLAND, Circuit Judge: Ceridian Corporation refused to

meet with a union bargaining committee during nonworking

hours, and at the same time refused to grant the employee

members of the committee unpaid leave to attend bargaining

sessions during working hours. The National Labor Relations

Board concluded that, in so doing, Ceridian impermissibly

interfered with its employees’ choice of bargaining

representatives. Because the Board’s conclusion was reasonable

and supported by substantial evidence, we deny Ceridian’s

petition for review and grant the Board’s cross-petition for

enforcement.

I

Ceridian is an information services company that provides

a variety of employment services to other companies throughout

the United States. One of its divisions offers assistance and

counseling to employees of customer companies that contract

with Ceridian. That division operates a call-in service center in

Eagan, Minnesota, where its consultants provide advice to

employees of customers on subjects ranging from substance

abuse to emotional well-being. The center operates 24 hours per

day, 7 days per week, 365 days per year. Consultants are

divided into teams depending on their areas of expertise, and

work the day, evening, or overnight shift.

Ceridian maintains a paid leave policy for its own

employees called “Personal Days Off” (PDO). Under the

policy, full-time employees can accrue up to four weeks of paid

time off per year. Employees may use their PDO for whatever

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purpose they wish, including vacation, illness, or personal

business, as long as they obtain management approval. Ceridian

also provides ten paid holidays per year, four of which are

“floating” holidays that can be designated by the employee

subject to management approval. Unpaid leave, other than for

long-term absences, is not available to employees unless

required by the Family and Medical Leave Act, 29 U.S.C. §

2901 et seq. Thus, PDO and the four floating holidays are

employees’ only options for discretionary leave. Employees

who take time off in excess of their accrued PDO and floating

holidays are subject to discipline, including discharge.

On June 5, 2003, the National Labor Relations Board

(NLRB) certified Service Employees International Union 113 as

the exclusive collective bargaining representative for

approximately 130 employees at the Minnesota call-in center.

The employees included day, evening, and overnight shift

consultants, as well as other employees classified as clinical

coaches, referral specialists, and network development

specialists. The union -- the first to represent employees at the

company -- put together a committee of six employees drawn

from different work groups and shifts. The six employees

volunteered to serve as the negotiating team in pursuit of a

collective bargaining agreement with Ceridian. 

The first bargaining session between the union’s committee

and Ceridian’s management took place on September 22, 2003.

All six employee representatives attended, along with a union

business representative and union negotiator. One of the first

topics of discussion was accounting for time spent by employees

in bargaining sessions. The union requested that employees be

permitted to take leave without pay, and indicated that it would

compensate the employees for their lost wages. Ceridian

refused this request and insisted instead that, in order to attend

bargaining sessions, employees would have to take time from

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their accrued PDO in full-day segments. Although Ceridian

continued to insist that employee representatives use their PDO

to attend bargaining sessions, after further discussion it agreed

to allow them to take PDO in four-hour segments (for sessions

that were limited in advance to half days), and to permit those

who exhausted their accrued PDO to borrow against the

following year’s allotment for the purpose of attending

bargaining sessions. Ceridian also tentatively agreed to

schedule the next bargaining session in the evening, in order to

lessen the PDO burden on the employee representatives, the

majority of whom worked the day shift.

Following this first meeting, Ceridian replaced its lead

attorney with another. In a subsequent telephone call to the

union’s business representative, new lead counsel cancelled the

evening bargaining meeting. He then followed up with a letter,

insisting that “all such meetings be conducted during normal

business hours.” Joint Appendix (J.A.) 114. 

After Ceridian announced that it would require employees

to use PDO for negotiating sessions and would refuse to

negotiate during nonworking hours, three of the union’s six

employee representatives stopped regularly attending bargaining

sessions. The other three continued to attend. Employee Jerry

Buchko used more than one hundred hours of his PDO and two

of his floating holidays to attend seventeen of eighteen sessions.

Employees Robert Lodin and Kevin Kirley were able to attend

most of the sessions without using PDO because they worked

the evening and night shifts. After the eighteen sessions, all

held during regular business hours on weekdays, the parties still

had not reached a contract.

On December 18, 2003, the union filed an unfair labor

practices charge with the NLRB. A hearing was held before an

administrative law judge (ALJ), and the Board entered its

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1

Section 7 of the NLRA grants employees the right “to bargain

collectively through representatives of their own choosing.” 29

U.S.C. § 157. Section 8(a)(1) makes it an unfair labor practice “to

interfere with . . . the exercise of the rights guaranteed” in section 7.

29 U.S.C. § 158(a)(1). And section 8(a)(5) makes it an unfair labor

practice for an employer “to refuse to bargain collectively with the

representatives of his employees.” 29 U.S.C. § 158(a)(5). See also

NLRA § 1, 29 U.S.C. § 151 (declaring that “protecting the exercise by

workers of full freedom of . . . designation of representatives of their

own choosing, for the purpose of negotiating the terms and conditions

of their employment,” is part of the “policy of the United States”). 

decision and order, adopting the ALJ’s recommendations, on

November 12, 2004. The Board found that Ceridian had

violated sections 8(a)(5) and (1) of the National Labor Relations

Act, 29 U.S.C. § 158(a)(5) and (1), by denying its employees

unpaid time off to attend bargaining sessions during the

workday, while simultaneously refusing to bargain during

nonworking hours. The Board therefore ordered Ceridian to

grant the employee representatives unpaid leave to attend

negotiating sessions held during working hours, or, in the

alternative, to schedule bargaining at mutually agreed-upon

times when the employees were not scheduled to work. See

Ceridian Corp. & SEIU Local 113, 343 NLRB No. 70, 2004 WL

2604608, at *13 (Nov. 12, 2004).

 Ceridian now petitions for review, and the Board crosspetitions for enforcement of its order.

II

Under the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA),

employees have a “fundamental right” to “select representatives

of their own choosing for collective bargaining or other mutual

protection without restraint or coercion by their employer.”

NLRB v. Jones & Laughlin Steel Corp., 301 U.S. 1, 33 (1937).1

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An employer may not take action that “effectively chills its

employees’ right to select their own bargaining representatives

by preventing or discouraging those representatives from fully

participating in . . . negotiations.” Procter & Gamble Mfg. Co.

v. NLRB, 658 F.2d 968, 977 (4th Cir. 1981). Ceridian

challenges, on three grounds, the NLRB’s conclusion that it

interfered with its employees’ choice of bargaining

representatives.

1. We first consider Ceridian’s contention that the Board’s

decision is “an unreasoned and inexplicable departure from its

own precedent.” Petr.’s Br. 19. As we have repeatedly held in

considering this kind of challenge, an “agency’s interpretation

of its own precedent is entitled to deference.” Cassell v. FCC,

154 F.3d 478, 483 (D.C. Cir. 1998); see Boca Airport, Inc. v.

FAA, 389 F.3d 185, 190 (D.C. Cir. 2004); U.S. Telecom Ass’n

v. FCC, 295 F.3d 1326, 1332 (D.C. Cir. 2002); Global Crossing

Telecomms., Inc. v. FCC, 259 F.3d 740, 746 (D.C. Cir. 2001).

 According to Ceridian, the Board’s precedents in this area

stand for the proposition that an employer is entitled to insist on

conducting collective bargaining during business hours, as long

as it gives employee representatives time off to attend

negotiations. The Board contradicted its precedents, Ceridian

argues, by holding that Ceridian was obligated to offer its

employees not just time off, but unpaid time off, in order to

attend bargaining sessions held during working hours. As

Ceridian points out, it did permit its employees to take time off,

although it required that the time come from the employees’

paid leave accounts accrued under the company’s PDO policy.

While they disagree as to their meaning, both Ceridian and

the Board agree which of the Board’s precedents are relevant:

Indiana & Michigan Elec. Co., 229 NLRB 576 (1977), enforced,

599 F.2d 185 (7th Cir. 1979); and Milwhite Co., Inc., 290 NLRB

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2

Indeed, that was Ceridian’s argument before the Board. See

Ceridian, 343 NLRB No. 70, at *6.

1150 (1988). At first glance, we find it difficult to see any

inconsistency between Indiana and Milwhite on the one hand,

and this case on the other. The same is true at second glance. 

In Indiana, the Board held:

We find that the Respondent’s refusal to grant

members of the Union’s negotiations committee

uncompensated leave to permit them to engage in

bargaining during working hours, while at the same

time refusing the Union’s request to bargain during

nonworking hours, is an unlawful interference with the

Union’s selection of its bargaining representatives.

229 NLRB at 576 (emphasis added). In Milwhite, the Board

repeated and reaffirmed the above quotation from Indiana. See

Milwhite, 290 NLRB at 1152-53. In the instant case, the Board

announced precisely the same rule with respect to Ceridian.

Ceridian rightly notes that the issue of paid versus unpaid

leave was not squarely presented in either Indiana or Milwhite.

In Indiana, the employee representatives sought unpaid leave to

attend negotiations, and the employer denied them any leave at

all; in Milwhite, the employer refused to attend negotiations

during working hours with an employee representative whose

services it deemed essential, and at the same time refused to

meet after working hours. At best, however, this makes

Ceridian’s case distinguishable from Indiana and Milwhite;

2

 it

does not render the Board’s decision a departure from those

cases. There are simply no grounds for concluding that the

Board acted inconsistently with its precedents by requiring an

employer who would not bargain after hours to provide

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3

Ceridian notes that, in one paragraph, Indiana referred to the

NLRA violation as the employer’s refusal to allow “time off,”

unadorned by the adjective “unpaid” or “uncompensated.” 229 NLRB

at 576. By that point in the opinion, however, the Board had already

referred -- five times -- to the employer’s unlawful act as refusing

“unpaid time off,” “leave without pay,” or “uncompensated leave.”

Id. The Board then went on to repeat those references three more

times. See id. at 577. We are unable to attribute the Board’s dropping

of an adjective on the occasion cited by petitioner to anything other

than, perhaps, its confidence that it had sufficiently made its point. 

“unpaid” leave during working hours, given Indiana’s repeated

finding that the employer in that case violated the NLRA by

refusing to provide employee representatives with

“uncompensated” leave. See Indiana, 229 NLRB at 576-77.3

2. It is a bit imprecise, of course, to ascribe the source of

Ceridian’s distress to the fact that the Board required it to

provide unpaid leave. Surely Ceridian would have been no

happier (although presumably its employees would have been)

had the Board required the company to provide paid leave for

attendance at negotiating sessions. Rather, the gravamen of

Ceridian’s claim is that it was wrong for the Board to bar it from

insisting that any leave come from an employee’s accrued PDO

-- leave that was paid, but finite.

 This brings us to Ceridian’s second line of attack: that “the

Board’s Decision constitutes an unauthorized and irrational

policy judgment.” Petr.’s Br. 19. In raising this argument,

Ceridian once again must confront our deferential standard of

review. The Supreme Court “has emphasized often that the

NLRB has the primary responsibility for developing and

applying national labor policy,” and that courts therefore must

accord its legal rules “considerable deference.” NLRB v. Curtin

Matheson Scientific, Inc., 494 U.S. 775, 786 (1990). We must

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4

This can occur quite quickly. As noted above, employeerepresentative Jerry Buchko used more than one hundred hours of his

“uphold a Board rule as long as it is rational and consistent”

with the NLRA. Id. at 787. “Like other administrative

agencies, the NLRB is entitled to judicial deference when it

interprets an ambiguous provision of a statute that it

administers.” ITT Indus., Inc. v. NLRB, 251 F.3d 995, 999 (D.C.

Cir. 2001) (quoting Lechmere, Inc. v. NLRB, 502 U.S. 527, 536

(1992) (citing Chevron U.S.A. Inc. v. Natural Res. Def. Council,

Inc., 467 U.S. 837, 842-43 (1984))).

 Ceridian’s argument is that, because an employer is not

required to pay employees for time spent attending negotiations,

and because Ceridian sees no meaningful difference between not

paying employees and requiring them to use PDO to attend

negotiations, it was irrational for the Board to find the company

in violation of the NLRA. The Board’s view, by contrast, is that

even if an employer is not required to pay employees while they

are participating in labor negotiations, there is a meaningful

difference between refusing to pay employees and requiring

them to deplete their finite leave allotments. The difference is

that a union can compensate employee representatives for their

lost pay (as the union offered to do here), but it cannot give them

more leave than the employer permits. See Ceridian, 343 NLRB

No. 70, at *12. 

The distinction the NLRB draws is a reasonable one. As the

Board concluded, Ceridian’s policy significantly circumscribes

the universe of employees who are able to serve as bargaining

representatives, and thus interferes with its employees’ choice

of representatives. See id. Employees who need their PDO to

accommodate substantial family responsibilities, for example,

would not be able to serve. An employee who exhausted his

annual PDO allotment on bargaining meetings4

 would have

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PDO and two of his floating holidays to attend seventeen of the

eighteen sessions held in this case, after which the parties still had not

reached agreement.

nothing left with which to meet his family responsibilities,

because the union cannot give him additional time off. And

Ceridian is simply wrong in arguing that it eliminated this

problem by modifying its policy to permit employees who

exhaust their annual PDO to borrow from the following year’s

allotment. Ceridian’s modification permitted such borrowing

only for the purpose of continuing to attend negotiating sessions;

it provided no relief for those needing leave for any other

reason. Thus, an employee representative with a sick relative

would still be out of leave and out of luck. 

3. Lastly, Ceridian questions the record support for the

Board’s finding that it violated the NLRA. As with the

company’s other contentions, our role in reviewing this claim is

limited. We must uphold a finding of the Board as long as it is

“supported by substantial evidence on the record considered as

a whole.” 29 U.S.C. § 160(e). In making that determination,

“we ask only whether on this record it would have been possible

for a reasonable jury to reach the Board’s conclusion,” giving

“substantial deference to the inferences drawn by the NLRB

from the facts.” Antelope Valley Bus Co. v. NLRB, 275 F.3d

1089, 1093 (D.C. Cir. 2002) (internal quotation marks omitted).

 We find that substantial evidence supports the Board’s

conclusion that Ceridian’s policy of requiring employees to use

PDO to attend negotiating sessions during the workday, while

simultaneously refusing to negotiate during nonworking hours,

interfered with the employees’ selection of their representatives.

As described above, it was reasonable for the Board to infer that

a policy that required the use of finite leave would chill

participation by those with family or other responsibilities. That

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inference is supported by the fact that the union lost half of its

negotiating team after Ceridian announced the policy. 

Ceridian contends that the Board’s finding is undermined

by its failure to consider the company’s justifications for its

policy. But the Board neither ignored Ceridian’s arguments nor

suggested that no set of circumstances could warrant the denial

of uncompensated leave to attend negotiating sessions. Rather,

the Board simply found that the circumstances proffered by

Ceridian were insufficient to justify its interference with its

employees’ choice of bargaining representatives. See Ceridian,

343 NLRB No. 70, at *12; cf. Procter & Gamble, 658 F.2d at

978 (enforcing a similar Board order after concluding that

“[t]here is no indication that the uncompensated leave remedy

will be abused in a manner disrupting Procter & Gamble’s

business operations”); Indiana, 599 F.2d at 191 (holding that the

Board could “reasonably conclude that any economic hardship

or managerial disruption suffered by the Company” in allowing

an employee unpaid time off to attend negotiations “is

manifestly less than that recognized by the Company from sick

leave and vacation time for employees arrived at through

collective bargaining”).

The first justification proffered by Ceridian is that, because

it had no prior “practice or policy that would entitle employee

representatives to intermittent unpaid time off for the purpose of

attending negotiations,” Petr.’s Br. 25, the Board’s decision

“conferr[ed] a preferred status on employees who choose to

engage in union activities while disadvantaging those who do

not.” Petr.’s Reply Br. 17. We do not see how employee

representatives are “preferred” over their co-workers by

permitting them to use uncompensated leave rather than PDO to

represent the interests of those co-workers in bargaining

sessions, nor how the co-workers are “disadvantag[ed]” by such

an arrangement. Moreover, it is no surprise that the company

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did not have a prior policy or practice on the subject, since this

was the first time a union had been certified to represent

Ceridian’s employees. But the absence of such a policy -- or

even a self-imposed policy to the contrary -- cannot trump the

requirements of the NLRA. As the Supreme Court held in the

Jones & Laughlin case, “[e]mployees have as clear a right to

organize and select their representatives for lawful purposes as

the [employer] has to organize its business.” 301 U.S. at 33; cf.

Procter & Gamble, 658 F.2d at 978 (holding that the options

available to the employer under the NLRB’s remedial order --

including “leeway . . . to meet evenings or weekends rather than

to grant any uncompensated leave” -- “demonstrate that the

Board’s order does not impose a new contractual provision upon

the parties,” but rather “serves only to remedy the unfair labor

practices found in this case”).

The second justification asserted by Ceridian is two-fold:

adherence to the PDO policy is required, the company avers, “to

ensure that staffing levels remain predictable and that customers

receive effective and timely service.” Petr.’s Br. 27 (quoted

words capitalized in original). Like the Board, we find this

argument “unpersuasive.” Ceridian, 343 NLRB No. 70, at *12.

With respect to predictability, Ceridian has offered no reason to

believe that its staffing projections cannot be adjusted to take

into account planned bargaining sessions; indeed, the company’s

willingness to permit year-ahead borrowing of PDO to attend

such sessions indicates that this is not a significant problem.

And with respect to customer service, there is nothing

unreasonable in the Board’s view that the absence of six (or

fewer) employees, out of a workforce of approximately 130, is

likely to have “minimal” impact. Id. In any event, the impact

on Ceridian is nothing compared to the impact on employers that

the Board found insufficient in Indiana and Milwhite. See

Indiana, 229 NLRB at 576 (rejecting the employer’s

justification that an employee representative was a

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5

Ceridian also professed concern for intruding upon the personal

time of the employee representatives, but since the employees were

the ones who proposed bargaining during nonworking hours, this

argument carries little weight.

troubleshooter “whose presence could not be spared” for the

requested eleven days of bargaining); Milwhite, 290 NLRB at

1150 (rejecting the employer’s justification that an employee

representative was one of only two bulldozer operators and that

his absence would leave “about 50 percent of the production

employees” idle while the representative was attending

negotiations).

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, Ceridian could have

minimized the impact of granting unpaid leave by scheduling

some of the bargaining sessions during nonworking hours.

Indeed, the impact could have been “avoided all together by

bargaining weekend days[,] for example,” when employees

would have needed neither unpaid leave nor PDO to attend.

Ceridian, 343 NLRB No. 70, at *12. Yet, Ceridian offered no

rationale other than “intrusion into [the] personal time” of its

management team for not making that accommodation. J.A.

114.5

 There was nothing unreasonable in the Board’s conclusion

that this rationale was insufficient to justify Ceridian’s

interference with its employees’ choice of bargaining

representatives.

III

In Indiana, the NLRB made clear that employers have

options with respect to scheduling bargaining sessions and

granting employee representatives leave to attend those sessions:

We do not suggest that an employer is compelled to

yield to a union’s request for negotiations outside

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normal business hours. It is free to insist on bargaining

during the working day, if it prefers, as the Respondent

did here. If it makes this choice, however, it cannot at

the same time refuse to allow unpaid time off to union

representatives on the bargaining committee . . . .

Alternatively, the Employer is free to acquiesce in the

Union’s request to bargain during nonworking hours in

order to reduce the amount of uncompensated leave . .

. and to minimize the effects of [employees’]

unavailability during their regular working hours . . . .

However, the Respondent cannot have it both ways.

Indiana, 229 NLRB at 576. The Board made clear that Ceridian

had those same options in this case. See Ceridian, 343 NLRB

No. 70, at *12. And here, as in Indiana, it was the employer’s

“attempt . . . to have it both ways that constitute[d] the violation

of the Act.” Indiana, 229 NLRB at 576. Accordingly,

Ceridian’s petition for review is denied, and the Board’s crosspetition for enforcement of its order is granted.

So ordered.

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