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ALLENTOWN MACK SALES & SERVICE, INC. v. NATIONAL LABOR RELATIONS BOARD - US SUPREME COURT DECISIONS ON-LINE
US Supreme Court Decisions - On-Line> Volume 522 > ALLENTOWN MACK SALES & SERVICE, INC. v. NATIONAL LABOR RELATIONS BOARD
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Mack Trucks, Inc., sold its Allentown, Pennsylvania, branch to petitioner Allentown Mack Sales & Service, Inc. Allentown thereafter operated as an independent dealership, employing 32 of the original 45 Mack employees. Although the Mack branch's service and parts employees had been represented by Local Lodge 724 of the machinists' union, a number of Mack employees suggested to the new owners, both before and immediately after the sale, that the union had lost their support or the support of bargaining-unit members generally. Allentown refused Local 724's request for recognition and for commencement of collectivebargaining negotiations, claiming a good-faith reasonable doubt as to the union's support; it later arranged an independent poll of the employees, who voted 19 to 13 against the union. The union then filed an unfairlabor-practice charge with the National Labor Relations Board. Under longstanding Board precedent, an employer who entertains a good-faith reasonable doubt whether a majority of its employees supports an incumbent union has three options: to request a formal, Board-supervised election, to withdraw recognition from the union and refuse to bargain, or to conduct an internal poll of employee support for the union. The Administrative Law Judge (ALJ) held, inter alia, that because Allentown lacked an "objective reasonable doubt" about Local 724's majority status, the poll violated §§ 8(a)(I) and 8(a)(5) of the National Labor Relations Act. The Board agreed and ordered petitioner to recognize and bargain with the union. The Court of Appeals enforced the order.
(a) This Court rejects Allentown's contention that, because the "good-faith reasonable doubt" standard for polls is the same as the standard for unilateral withdrawal of recognition and for employer initiation of a Board-supervised election, the Board irrationally permits employers to poll only when it would be unnecessary and legally pointless to do so. While the Board's adoption of this unitary standard is in some respects puzzling, it is not so irrational as to be "arbitrary [or] capri-cralaw
(b) On the evidence presented, a reasonable jury could not have found that Allentown lacked a "good-faith reasonable doubt" about whether Local 724 enjoyed continuing employee support. The Board's contrary finding rests on a refusal to credit probative circumstantial evidence, and on evidentiary demands that go beyond the substantive standard the Board purports to apply. Accepting the Board's concession that Allentown did receive reliable information that 7 of the 32 bargainingunit employees did not support the union, the remaining 25 would have had to support the union by a margin of 17 to 8-a ratio of more than 2 to I-if the union commanded majority support. The statements of various employees proffered by Allentown would cause anyone to doubt that degree of support, and neither the Board nor the AL J discussed any evidence that Allentown should have weighed on the other side. The Board cannot covertly transform its presumption of continuing majority support into a working assumption that all of a successor's employees support the union until proved otherwise. Pp. 366-371.
SCALIA, J., delivered the opinion for a unanimous Court with respect to Part I, the opinion of the Court with respect to Part II, in which STEVENS, SOUTER, GINSBURG, and BREYER, JJ., joined, and the opinion of the Court with respect to Parts III and IV, in which REHNQUIST, C.J., and O'CONNOR, KENNEDY, and THOMAS, JJ., joined. REHNQUIST, C.J., filed an opinion concurring in part and dissenting in part, in which O'CONNOR, KENNEDY, and THOMAS, JJ., joined, post, p. 380. BREYER, J., filed an opinion concurring in part and dissenting in part, in which STEVENS, SOUTER, and GINSBURG, JJ., joined, post, p. 388.cralaw
JUSTICE SCALIA delivered the opinion of the Court. Under longstanding precedent of the National Labor Relations Board, an employer who believes that an incumbent union no longer enjoys the support of a majority of its employees has three options: to request a formal, Boardsupervised election, to withdraw recognition from the union and refuse to bargain, or to conduct an internal poll of employee support for the union. The Board has held that the latter two are unfair labor practices unless the employer can show that it had a "good-faith reasonable doubt" about the union's majority support. We must decide whether the Board's standard for employer polling is rational and consistent with the National Labor Relations Act, and whether the Board's factual determinations in this case are supported by substantial evidence in the record.
Laurence Gold, Jonathan P. Hiatt, and Marsha S. Berzon filed a brief for the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations as amicus curiae urging affirmance.cralaw
On January 2,1991, Local 724 asked Allentown Mack Sales to recognize it as the employees' collective-bargaining representative, and to begin negotiations for a contract. The new employer rejected that request by letter dated January 25, claiming a "good faith doubt as to support of the Union among the employees." Id., at 1205. The letter also announced that Allentown had "arranged for an independent poll by secret ballot of its hourly employees to be conducted under guidelines prescribed by the National Labor Relations Board." Ibid. The poll, supervised by a Roman Catholic priest, was conducted on February 8, 1991; the union lost 19cralaw
to 13. Shortly thereafter, the union filed an unfair-Iaborpractice charge with the Board.
Allentown challenges the Board's decision in this case on several grounds. First, it contends that because the Board's "reasonable doubt" standard for employer polls is the same as its standard for unilateral withdrawal of recognition and for employer initiation of a Board-supervised election (a so-called "Representation Management," or "RM," election), the Board irrationally permits employers to poll only when it would be unnecessary and legally pointless to do so. Sec-cralaw
While the Board's adoption of a unitary standard for polling, RM elections, and withdrawals of recognition is in some respects a puzzling policy, we do not find it so irrational as to be "arbitrary [or] capricious" within the meaning of the Administrative Procedure Act, 5 U. S. C. § 706. The Board believes that employer polling is potentially "disruptive" to established bargaining relationships and "unsettling" to employees, and so has chosen to limit severely the circum-cralaw
It is true enough that this makes polling useless as a means of insulating a contemplated withdrawal of recognition against an unfair-labor-practice charge-but there is more to life (and even to business) than escaping unfairlabor-practice findings. An employer concerned with good employee relations might recognize that abrupt withdrawal of recognition-even from a union that no longer has majority support-will certainly antagonize union supporters, and perhaps even alienate employees who are on the fence. Preceding that action with a careful, unbiased poll can prevent these consequences. The "polls are useless" argument falsely assumes, moreover, that every employer will want to withdraw recognition as soon as he has enough evidence of lack of union support to defend against an unfair-Iaborpractice charge. It seems to us that an employer whose evidence met the "good-faith reasonable doubt" standard might nonetheless want to withdraw recognition only if he had conclusive evidence that the union in fact lacked majority support, lest he go through the time and expense of an (ultimately victorious) unfair-labor-practice suit for a benefit that will only last until the next election. See Texas Petrochemicals, supra, at 1063. And finally, it is probably the case that, though the standard for conviction of an unfair labor practice with regard to polling is identical to the standard with regard to withdrawal of recognition, the chance that a charge will be filed is significantly less with regard to the polling, particularly if the union wins.
It must be acknowledged that the Board's avowed preference for RM elections over polls fits uncomfortably with its unitary standard; as the Court of Appeals pointed out, thatcralaw
IJUSTICE BREYER'S opinion asserts that this issue is not included within the question presented by the petition. Post, at 388 (opinion concurring in part and dissenting in part). The question reads: ''Whether the National Labor Relations Board erred in holding that a successor employer cannot conduct a poll to determine whether a majority of its employees support a union unless it already has obtained so much evidence of no majority support as to render the poll meaningless." Pet. for Cert. i. The phrase "so much ... as to render the poll meaningless" is of course conclusory and argumentative. Fairly read, the question asks whether the Board erred by requiring too much evidence of majority support. That question can be answered in the affirmative if either (1) the Board's polling standard is irrational or inconsistent with the Act, or (2) the Board erroneously found that the evidence in this case was insufficient to meet that standard.cralaw
2JU8TICE BREYER suggests that we have focused on the wrong words, and that the explanation for the Board's holding here is not that portion of its polling standard which requires "reasonable doubt" but that which requires the doubt to be "based on objective considerations." The Board has not stressed the word "objective" in its brief or argument, for the verycralaw
good reason that the meaning of the word has nothing to do with the force, as opposed to the source, of the considerations supporting the employer's doubt. See Webster's New International Dictionary 1679 (2d ed. 1949) (def. 2: "Emphasizing or expressing the nature of reality as it is apart from self-consciousness"). Requiring the employer's doubt to be based on "objective" considerations reinforces the requirement that the doubt be "reasonable," imposing on the employer the burden of showing that it was supported by evidence external to the employer's own (subjective) impressions. JUSTICE BREYER asserts, instead, that the word "objective" has been redefined through a series of Board decisions ignoring its real meaning, so that it now means something like "exceedingly reliable." As we shall discuss in Part IV, the Board is entitled to create higher standards of evidentiary proof by rule, or even by explicit announcement in adjudication (assuming adequate warning); but when the Board simply repeatedly finds evidence not "objective" that is so, its decisions have no permanent deleterious effect upon the English language.cralaw
But the most significant evidence excluded from consideration by the Board consisted of statements of two employees regarding not merely their own support of the union, but support among the work force in general. Kermit Bloch, who worked on the night shift, told an Allentown manager that "the entire night shift did not want the Union." Ibid. The ALJ refused to credit this, because "Bloch did not testify and thus could not explain how he formed his opinion about the views of his fellow employees." Ibid. Unsubstantiated assertions that other employees do not support the union certainly do not establish the fact of that disfavor with the degree of reliability ordinarily demanded in legal proceedings. But under the Board's enunciated test for polling, it is not the fact of disfavor that is at issue (the poll itself is meant to establish that), but rather the existence of a reason-cralaw
3JUSTICE BREYER points out that the ALJ did not disregard Mohr's statement entirely, but merely found that it was insufficient to establish a good-faith reasonable doubt. That observation is accurate but irrelevant. The Board discussed Mohr's statement in its own opinion, and the language quoted above makes it clear that the Board gave it no weight at all.cralaw
Accepting the Board's apparent (and in our view inescapable) concession that Allentown received reliable information that 7 of the bargaining-unit employees did not support the union, the remaining 25 would have had to support the union by a margin of 17 to 8-a ratio of more than 2 to i-if the union commanded majority support. The statements of Bloch and Mohr would cause anyone to doubt that degree of support, and neither the Board nor the ALJ discussed any evidence that Allentown should have weighed on the other side. The most pro-union statement cited in the ALJ's opinion was Ron Mohr's comment that he personally "could work with or without the Union," and "was there to do his job." Id., at 1207. The Board cannot covertly transform its presumption of continuing majority support into a working assumption that all of a successor's employees support the union until proved otherwise. Giving fair weight to Allentown's circumstantial evidence, we think it quite impossible for a rational factfinder to avoid the conclusion that Allentown had reasonable, good-faith grounds to doubt-to be uncertain about-the union's retention of majority support.cralaw
4 The Board cited in its brief a number of cases in which it found circumstantial evidence sufficient to support a "good-faith reasonable doubt." See Brief for Respondent 31-32, n. 8. Those cases do indeed reveal a genuine interest in circumstantial evidence, but the most recent of them, J & J Drainage Products Co., 269 N. L. R. B. 1163 (1984), was decided more than a decade ago. Allentown contends that the Board has abandoned the good-faith-doubt test, not that it never existed.cralaw
See also Weeks, The Union's Mid-Contract Loss of Majority Support: A Waivering Presumption, 20 Wake Forest L. Rev. 883, 889 (1984). Members of this Court have observed the same phenomenon. See NLRB v. Curtin Matheson Scientific, Inc., 494 U. S. 775, 797 (1990) (REHNQUIST, C.J., concurring) ("[S]ome recent decisions suggest that [the Board] now requires an employer to show that individual employees have 'expressed desires' to repudiate the incumbent union in order to establish a reasonable doubt of the union's majority status"); id., at 799 (Blackmun, J., dissenting) ("[T]he Board appears to require that good-faith doubt be established by express avowals of individual employees").
It is certainly conceivable that an adjudicating agency might consistently require a particular substantive standard to be established by a quantity or character of evidence so far beyond what reason and logic would require as to make it apparent that the announced standard is not really the effective one. And it is conceivable that in certain categories of cases an adjudicating agency which purports to be applying a preponderance standard of proof might so consistently demand in fact more than a preponderance, that all should be on notice from its case law that the genuine burden of proof is more than a preponderance. The question arises, then, whether, if that should be the situation that obtains here, we ought to measure the evidentiary support for the Board's decision against the standards consistently applied rather than the standards recited. As a theoretical matter (and leaving aside the question of legal authority), the Board could certainly have raised the bar for employer polling orcralaw
The Administrative Procedure Act, which governs the proceedings of administrative agencies and related judicial review, establishes a scheme of "reasoned decisionmaking." Motor Vehicle Mfrs. Assn. of United States, Inc. v. State Farm Mut. Automobile Ins. Co., 463 U. S. 29, 52 (1983). Not only must an agency's decreed result be within the scope of its lawful authority, but the process by which it reaches that result must be logical and rational. Courts enforce this principle with regularity when they set aside agency regulations which, though well within the agencies' scope of authority, are not supported by the reasons that the agencies adduce. See SEC v. Chenery Corp., 318 U. S. 80 (1943); SEC v. Chenery Corp., 332 U. S. 194 (1947). The National Labor Relations Board, uniquely among major federal administrative agencies, has chosen to promulgate virtually all the legal rules in its field through adjudication rather than rulemaking. See, e. g., NLRB v. Bell Aerospace Co., 416 U. S. 267,294-295 (1974). (To our knowledge, only one regulation has ever been adopted by the Board, dealing with the appropriate size of bargaining units in the health care industry. See 29 CFR § 103.30 (1997).) But adjudication is subject to the requirement of reasoned decisionmaking as well. It is hard to imagine a more violent breach of that requirement than applying a rule of primary conduct or a standard of proof which is in fact different from the rule or standard formally announced. And the consistent repetition of that breach can hardly mend it.cralaw
Reasoned decisionmaking, in which the rule announced is the rule applied, promotes sound results, and unreasoned decisionmaking the opposite. The evil of a decision that applies a standard other than the one it enunciates spreads in both directions, preventing both consistent application of the law by subordinate agency personnel (notably ALJ's), and effective review of the law by the courts. These consequences are well exemplified by a recent withdrawal-ofrecognition case in which the Board explicitly reaffirmed its adherence to the preponderance-of-the-evidence standard. One of the Board's ALJ's, interpreting the agency's prior cases as many others have, had concluded that the Board in fact required "'clear, cogent, and convincing'" evidence that the union no longer commanded a majority. Laidlaw Waste Systems, Inc., 307 N. L. R. B. 1211 (1992). On review the Board rejected that standard, insisting that "in order to rebut the presumption of an incumbent union's majority status, an employer must show by a preponderance of the evidence ... objective factors sufficient to support a reasonable and good-faith doubt of the union's majority." Ibid. So far, so good. The Board then went on to add, however, that "[t]his is not to say that the terms 'clear, cogent, and convincing' have no significance at all in withdrawal of recognition cases." Ibid. It then proceeded to make the waters impenetrably muddy with the following:
Because reasoned decisionmaking demands it, and because the systemic consequences of any other approach are unacceptable, the Board must be required to apply in fact the clearly understood legal standards that it enunciates in principle, such as good-faith reasonable doubt and preponderance of the evidence. Reviewing courts are entitled tocralaw
That principle is not, as JUSTICE BREYER suggests, inconsistent with our decisions according "substantial deference to an agency's interpretation of its own regulations." Thomas Jefferson Univ. v. Shalala, 512 U. S. 504, 512 (1994). Substantive review of an agency's interpretation of its regulations is governed only by that general provision of the Administrative Procedure Act which requires courts to set aside agency action that is "arbitrary, capricious, an abuse of discretion, or otherwise not in accordance with law," 5 U. S. C. § 706(2)(A). It falls well within this text to give the agency the benefit of the doubt as to the meaning of its regulation. On-the-record agency factfinding, however, is also governed by a provision that requires the agency action to be set aside if it is "unsupported by substantial evidence," § 706(2)(E)-which is the very specific requirement at issue here. See also 29 U. S. C. § 160(e) ("The findings of the Board with respect to questions of fact if supported by substantial evidence on the record considered as a whole shall be conclusive"). The "substantial evidence" test itself already gives the agency the benefit of the doubt, since it requires not the degree of evidence which satisfies the court that the requisite fact exists, but merely the degree which could satisfy a reasonable factfinder. See Columbian Enameling & Stamping Co., 306 U. S., at 300. This is an objective test, and there is no room within it for deference to an agency's eccentric view of what a reasonable factfinder ought to demand. We do not, moreover (we could not possibly), search to find revisions of the agency's rules-revisions of the requisite fact that the adjudication is supposed to determinehidden in the agency's factual findings. In the regime envisioned by JUSTICE BREYER-a regime in which inadequatecralaw
The Board can, of course, forthrightly and explicitly adopt counterfactual evidentiary presumptions (which are in effect substantive rules of law) as a way of furthering particular legal or policy goals-for example, the Board's irrebuttable presumption of majority support for the union during the year following certification, see, e. g., Station KKHI, 284 N. L. R. B. 1339, 1340 (1987), enf'd, 891 F.2d 230 (CA9 1989). The Board might also be justified in forthrightly and explicitly adopting a rule of evidence that categorically excludes certain testimony on policy grounds, without reference to its inherent probative value. (Such clearly announced rules of law or of evidentiary exclusion would of course be subject to judicial review for their reasonableness and their compatibility with the Act.) That is not the sort of Board action at issue here, however, but rather the Board's allegedly systematic undervaluation of certain evidence, or allegedly systematic exaggeration of what the evidence must prove. See, e. g., Westbrook Bowl, 293 N. L. R. B. 1000, 1001, n. 11 (1989) ("The Board has stated that 'testimony concerning conversations directly with the employees involved ... is much more reliable than testimony concerning merely a few employees ostensibly conveying the sentiments of their fellows' "), quoting Sofco, Inc., 268 N. L. R. B. 159, 160, n. 10 (1983). When the Board purports to be engaged in simple factfinding, unconstrained by substantive presumptions or evidentiary rules of exclusion, it is not free to prescribe what inferences from the evidence it will accept and reject, but must draw all those inferences that the evidence fairly demands. "Substantial evidence" review exists precisely to ensure that the Board achieves minimal compliance with this obliga-cralaw
For the foregoing reasons, we need not determine whether the Board has consistently rejected or discounted probative evidence so as to cause "good-faith reasonable doubt" or "preponderance of the evidence" to mean something more than what the terms connote. The line of precedents relied on by the ALJ and the Court of Appeals could not render irrelevant to the Board's decision, and hence to our review, any evidence that tends to establish the existence of a goodfaith reasonable doubt. It was therefore error, for example, for the ALJ to discount Ron Mohr's opinion about lack of union support because of "the Board's historical treatment of unverified assertions by an employee about another employee's sentiments." 316 N. L. R. B., at 1208. And it was error for the Court of Appeals to rely upon the fact that "[t]he Board has consistently questioned the reliability of reports by one employee of the antipathy of other employees toward their union." 83 F. 3d, at 1488, citing Westbrook Bowl, supra, at 1001, n. 11; Sofco, Inc., supra, at 160, n. 10. Assuming that those assessments of the Board's prior behavior are true, they nonetheless provide no justification for the Board's factual inferences here. Of course, the Board is entitled to be skeptical about the employer's claimed reliance on secondhand reports when the reporter has little basis for knowledge, or has some incentive to mislead. But that is a matter of logic and sound inference from all the circumstances, not an arbitrary rule of disregard to be extracted from prior Board decisions.
The same is true of the Board precedents holding that "an employee's statements of dissatisfaction with the quality of union representation may not be treated as opposition to union representation," and that "an employer may not rely on an employee's anti-union sentiments, expressed during a job interview in which the employer has indicated that there will be no union." 83 F. 3d, at 1488, citing Destileria Ser-cralaw
The Board's standard for employer polls requires a showing of reasonable doubt, based on sufficient objective considerations, that the union continues to enjoy majority support. Texas Petrochemicals Corp., 296 N. L. R. B. 1057, 1061 (1989), enf'd as modified, 923 F.2d 398 (CA5 1991); Auciello Iron Works, Inc. v. NLRB, 517 U. S. 781, 786-787 (1996);cralaw
NLRB v. Curtin Matheson Scientific, Inc., 494 U. S. 775, 778 (1990). While simply stated, what this rule means in practice is harder to pin down. As suggested by the Court's opinion, ante, at 371-373, despite its billing as a "good-faith reasonable doubt" standard, this test appears to be quite rigorous. The Board so concedes: "It is true that the Board's 'reasonable doubt' standard is sufficiently rigorous and factspecific that employers often cannot be certain in advance whether their evidentiary basis either for taking a poll or for withdrawing recognition will ultimately be deemed to have met that standard." Brief for Respondent 38.
The Board's standard is sufficiently stringent so as to exclude most circumstantial evidence (and quite a bit of direct evidence) from consideration and therefore to preclude polling except in extremely limited circumstances-ironically, those in which a poll has almost no practical value. It requires as a prerequisite to questioning a union's majority support that the employer have information that it is forbidden to obtain by the most effective method. See Curtin Matheson, supra, at 797 (REHNQUIST, C.J., concurring) ("I have considerable doubt whether the Board may insist that good-faith doubt be determined only on the basis of sentiments of individual employees, and at the same time bar the employer from using what might be the only effective means of determining those sentiments"); 494 U. S., at 799, and n. 3 (Blackmun, J., dissenting). The Board's argument that polls are still valuable in ensuring that the union lacks majority support in fact, effectively concedes that polls will have only extremely limited scope. The Board's standard also leaves little practical value for employers in polling, since a losing union can ex post challenge a poll on the same grounds as a withdrawal of recognition, as happened here.
The Board argues first that its employer polling standard is authorized by, and consistent with, the Act because it promotes the overriding goal of industrial peace. Polling purportedly threatens industrial peace because it "raises si-cralaw
1 The Board argues in the alternative that its standard is authorized by § 8(a)(5), even though a violation of that section was not alleged in this case. But the Board provides no explanation as to how the authority it is granted or the protection extended employees under § 8(a)(5) differs from that of § 8(a)(1). Section 8(a)(5) states: "It shall be an unfair labor practice for an employer-(5) to refuse to bargain collectively with the representatives of his employees .... " 29 U. S. C. § 158(a)(5).cralaw
2 The Board contends the Struksnes standard is not appropriate where the union is already established and enjoys a presumption of majority support, as opposed to the organizing phase where the union must establish its majority support. Brief for Respondent 28. But the safeguardscralaw
Additionally, the Board's rationale gives short shrift to the Act's goal of protecting employee choice. Auciello Iron Works, 517 U. S., at 790-791. By ascertaining employee support for the union, a poll indirectly promotes this goal. Employees are not properly represented by a union lacking majority support. Employers also have a legitimate, recognized interest in not bargaining with a union lacking majority support. Texas Petrochemicals, supra, at 1062. The ability to poll employees thus provides the employer (and the employees) with a neutral and effective manner of obtaining information relevant to determining the employees' proper representative and the employer's bargaining obligations. See Curtin Matheson, 494 U. S., at 797 (REHNQUIST, C.J., concurring); see also id., at 799 (Blackmun, J., concurring). Stability, while an important goal of the Act, see Fall River, supra, at 37, is not its be-all and end-all. That goal would not justify, for example, allowing a nonmajority union to remain in place (after a certification or contract bar has expired) simply by denying employers any effective means of ascertaining employee views. I conclude that the Board's standard restricts polling in the absence of coercion or restraint of employee rights and therefore is contrary to the Act.
protect against the potentially disruptive or coercive effects of polls equally in both situations. If anything, polling would seem more unsettling before the union is established. And in both situations, a poll serves the purpose of providing a neutral determination of the employees' support for the union, where such information is clearly relevant to employers in making legitimate decisions regarding their bargaining obligations under the Act. Moreover, to raise the bar to polling on the basis of the presumption of majority support would in effect make that presumption unassailable by denying employers the most effective, and least coercive, way to obtain information on the actual level of union support.cralaw
3 On the other hand, if the union wins an employer poll, the employer apparently must recognize the union, Nation-Wide Plastics, Inc., 197 N. L. R. B. 996 (1972), which is then entitled to a conclusive presumption of majority support for a reasonable time to permit bargaining. If an agreement is reached, a contract bar will apply. Auciello Iron Works, Inc. v. NLRB, 517 U. S. 781,791 (1996). A losing employer thus would be barred for some time from conducting another poll.cralaw
Under Gissel's reasoning, employer solicitation of employee views is protected speech, although such solicitation can constitutionally be prohibited where it amounts to coercion or threats of reprisal. There is no logical basis for a distinction between soliciting views, as in the instant case, and communicating views. Our decisions have concluded that First Amendment protection extends equally to thecralaw
In DeBartolo, we held that the Board's interpretation of the Act to proscribe peaceful handbilling by a union was not permissible. The Court acknowledged the Board's special authority to construe the Act and the normal deference it is therefore accorded. The Court nevertheless concluded that the Board's interpretation was not entitled to deference because, "where an otherwise acceptable construction of a statute would raise serious constitutional problems, the Court will construe the statute to avoid such problems." 485 U. S., at 575. See also Bill Johnson's Restaurants, Inc. v. NLRB, 461 U. S. 731, 742-743 (1983) (the Board's interpretation of the Act is untenable in light of First Amendment concernscralaw
I concur in Parts I and II and dissent from Parts III and IV of the Court's opinion. In Parts III and IV; the Court holds unlawful an agency conclusion on the ground that it is "not supported by substantial evidence." Ante, at 380; see 29 U. S. C. § 160(e); 5 U. S. C. § 706(2)(E). That question was not presented to us in the petition for certiorari. In deciding it, the Court has departed from the half-century old legal standard governing this type of review. See Universal Camera Corp. v. NLRB, 340 U. S. 474, 490-491 (1951). It has rewritten a National Labor Relations Board (Board) rule without adequate justification. It has ignored certain evidentiary presumptions developed by the Board to provide guidance in the application of this rule. And it has failed to give the kind of leeway to the Board's factfinding authoritycralaw
To illustrate the problem with the majority's analysis, I must describe the factual background, the evidence, and the ALJ's findings in some detail. In December 1990, three managers at Mack Trucks (and several other investors) bought Mack. All of the 45 employees in the union's bargaining unit were dismissed. The new owners changed the company's name to Allentown and then interviewed and rehired 32 of the 45 recently dismissed workers, putting them back to work at jobs similar to those they previously held. The union, which had represented those employees for 17 years, sought continued recognition; Allentown refused it; the Board's general counsel brought unfair labor practice charges; and the ALJ found that Allentown was a "successor" corporation to Mack, 316 N. L. R. B. 1199, 1204 (1995), a finding that was affirmed by the Board, id., at 1199, and was not challenged in the Court of Appeals. Because Allen-cralaw
Allentown took the last mentioned of these options. According to the ALJ, it sought to show that it had an "objective" good-faith doubt primarily by presenting the testimony of Allentown managers, who, in turn, reported statements made to them by 14 employees. The ALJ set aside the statements of 5 of those employees as insignificant for various reasons-for example because the employees were not among the rehired 32, because their statements were equivocal, or because they made the statements at a time too long before the transition. 316 N. L. R. B., at 1206-1207. The majority does not take issue with the ALJ's reasoning with respect to these employees. The ALJ then found that statements made by six, and possibly seven, employees (22% of the 32) helped Allentown show an "objective" reasonable doubt. Id., at 1207. The majority does not quarrel with this conclusion. The majority does, however, take issue with the ALJ's decision not to count in Allentown's favor three further statements, made by employees Marsh, Bloch, and Mohr. Id., at 1206-1207. The majority says that thesecralaw
I do not see how, on the record before us, one could plausibly argue that these relevant general findings of the Boardcralaw
The majority says that "reason demands" that Bloch's statement "be given considerable weight." Ante, at 370. But why? The Board, drawing upon both reason and experience, has said it will "view with suspicion and caution" one employee's statements "purporting to represent the views of other employees." Wallkill Valley General Hospital, 288 N. L. R. B. 103, 109 (1988), enf'd as modified, 866 F.2d 632 (CA3 1989); see also Louisiana-Pacific Corp., 283 N. L. R. B.cralaw
Finally, consider the Allentown manager's statement that Mohr told him that "if a vote was taken, the Union would lose." 316 N. L. R. B., at 1207. Since, at least from the perspective of the ALJ and the Board, the treatment of this statement presented a closer question, I shall set forth the ALJ's discussion of the matter in full.cralaw
One can find reflected in the majority opinion some of the reasons the ALJ gave for discounting the significance of Mohr's statement. The majority says of the ALJ's first reason (namely, that "'there is no evidence with respect to how'" Mohr "'gained this knowledge''') that this reason is "irrelevan[t]." Ante, at 370. But why so? The lack of anycralaw
The irrationality of these assumptions, however, is not obvious. The primary objective of the National Labor Relations Act is to secure labor peace. Fall River Dyeing & Finishing Corp. v. NLRB, 482 U. S., at 38. To preserve the status quo ante may help to preserve labor peace; the first presumption may help to do so by assuming (in the absence of contrary evidence) that workers wish to preserve that status quo, see id., at 38-40; the second, by requiring detailed evidence before dislodging the status quo, may help to do the same. Regardless, no one has argued that these presumptions are contradictory or illogical.cralaw