Task: songer_appnatpr

What follows is an opinion from a United States Court of Appeals.
Intervenors who participated as parties at the courts of appeals should be counted as either appellants or respondents when it can be determined whose position they supported. For example, if there were two plaintiffs who lost in district court, appealed, and were joined by four intervenors who also asked the court of appeals to reverse the district court, the number of appellants should be coded as six.
In some cases there is some confusion over who should be listed as the appellant and who as the respondent. This confusion is primarily the result of the presence of multiple docket numbers consolidated into a single appeal that is disposed of by a single opinion. Most frequently, this occurs when there are cross appeals and/or when one litigant sued (or was sued by) multiple litigants that were originally filed in district court as separate actions. The coding rule followed in such cases should be to go strictly by the designation provided in the title of the case. The first person listed in the title as the appellant should be coded as the appellant even if they subsequently appeared in a second docket number as the respondent and regardless of who was characterized as the appellant in the opinion.
To clarify the coding conventions, consider the following hypothetical case in which the US Justice Department sues a labor union to strike down a racially discriminatory seniority system and the corporation (siding with the position of its union) simultaneously sues the government to get an injunction to block enforcement of the relevant civil rights law. From a district court decision that consolidated the two suits and declared the seniority system illegal but refused to impose financial penalties on the union, the corporation appeals and the government and union file cross appeals from the decision in the suit brought by the government. Assume the case was listed in the Federal Reporter as follows:
United States of America,
Plaintiff, Appellant
v
International Brotherhood of Widget Workers,AFL-CIO
Defendant, Appellee.
International Brotherhood of Widget Workers,AFL-CIO
Defendants, Cross-appellants
v
United States of America.
Widgets, Inc. & Susan Kuersten Sheehan, President & Chairman
of the Board
Plaintiff, Appellants,
v
United States of America,
Defendant, Appellee.
This case should be coded as follows:Appellant = United States, Respondents = International Brotherhood of Widget Workers Widgets, Inc., Total number of appellants = 1, Number of appellants that fall into the category "the federal government, its agencies, and officials" = 1, Total number of respondents = 3, Number of respondents that fall into the category "private business and its executives" = 2, Number of respondents that fall into the category "groups and associations" = 1.
Note that if an individual is listed by name, but their appearance in the case is as a government official, then they should be counted as a government rather than as a private person. For example, in the case "Billy Jones & Alfredo Ruiz v Joe Smith" where Smith is a state prisoner who brought a civil rights suit against two of the wardens in the prison (Jones & Ruiz), the following values should be coded: number of appellants that fall into the category "natural persons" =0 and number that fall into the category "state governments, their agencies, and officials" =2. A similar logic should be applied to businesses and associations. Officers of a company or association whose role in the case is as a representative of their company or association should be coded as being a business or association rather than as a natural person. However, employees of a business or a government who are suing their employer should be coded as natural persons. Likewise, employees who are charged with criminal conduct for action that was contrary to the company policies should be considered natural persons.
If the title of a case listed a corporation by name and then listed the names of two individuals that the opinion indicated were top officers of the same corporation as the appellants, then the number of appellants should be coded as three and all three were coded as a business (with the identical detailed code). Similar logic should be applied when government officials or officers of an association were listed by name.
Your specific task is to determine the total number of appellants in the case that fall into the category "natural persons". If the total number cannot be determined (e.g., if the appellant is listed as "Smith, et. al." and the opinion does not specify who is included in the "et.al."), then answer 99.

HARLINGTON WOOD, Jr., Circuit Judge.
In this appeal, we are asked to determine whether the district court correctly concluded that a grievance filed by the Teamsters, Chauffeurs, and Helpers Local Union No. 627 (the “Union”) is not subject to arbitration under the collective bargaining agreement between R.J. Distributing Company (“R.J.”) and the Union.
I.
On May 1,1983, the Union executed, as it had for the preceding twenty years, a collective bargaining agreement with a number of companies, collectively, the Beer and Liquor Distributors of the Peoria, Illinois area. R.J. is a member of this multiemployer bargaining group. The Union represents the employees of the signatory companies. Pabst Brewing Company, which had been a member of this multiemployer bargaining group since at least 1971, withdrew in 1977. Since 1977, Pabst has negotiated and executed separate agreements with the Union.
In 1971, the Union and the Beer and Liquor Distributors negotiated “Sale of Assets” provisions which have been included in substantially the same form in all subsequent agreements between the parties. The “Sale of Assets” provisions of the 1983 agreement between the Union and the Beer and Liquor Distributors read as follows: Section 21.1:
In the event the Company, party to this Agreement, acquires work or performs services previously performed by a company not party to this Agreement, then in that event, the employees of such company not party to this Agreement shall have no rights under this Agreement, including, specifically, the right to go with the work and acquire seniority under the terms and provisions of this Agreement, except as new employees. Section 21.2:
In the event that this Company, party to this Agreement, acquires work or performs services previously performed by another company who is also a party to this Agreement, then in that event, the employee so affected shall have the right to follow the work, and shall retain benefits and rights previously in effect with their former Company.
The corresponding sections of the 1983 agreement between the Union and Pabst are identical.
On August 9, 1983, Pabst and R.J. entered into an agreement whereby R.J. agreed to purchase Pabst’s distribution operation in the Peoria area. On August 25, 1983, the Union filed a grievance against R.J., claiming that under section 21.2 of the 1983 agreement between the Union and the Beer and Liquor Distributors, the Pabst employees were entitled to employment with R.J. and to retain the benefits and seniority they had acquired during their employment with Pabst. On August 26, 1983, Pabst terminated the employment of employees represented by the Union under the Pabst agreement.
When R.J. denied the grievance, the Union sought to invoke the arbitration provisions of the agreement.
Section 13.1 provides that:
Should any controversy arise over the interpretation, application, or working conditions covered by this agreement, which cannot be settled verbally by the employee and the Company, it shall be reduced to writing no later than fourteen (14) days after such impasse is reached.
Within five-days of receiving the Union’s grievance, the Company must schedule a meeting with the Union’s business agent. Within five days of the meeting, the Company must provide the agent a written answer. Section 13.2 of the Agreement. If the dispute has not been satisfactorily resolved, the Union may request arbitration within ten days of the Company’s answer. Section 13.3 of the Agreement. Under section 13.5, “the arbitrator shall be bound by the terms and provisions of this Agreement and shall have authority to consider only grievances presenting an arbitrable issue under this Agreement.”
R.J. refused to arbitrate, and filed an action pursuant to section 301 of the Labor-Management Relations Act, 29 U.S.C. § 185, seeking a declaration that it was not required to arbitrate the dispute and that section 21.1 of the agreement applied to the controversy. The Union counterclaimed to compel R.J. to arbitrate the grievance. Both parties moved for summary judgment. Following an evidentiary hearing, R.J.’s motion was granted, the Union s motion was denied, and the case was dismissed.
The district court reasoned that the dispute was not arbitrable because the Union was asserting the interests of employees who were not covered by the agreement between the Union and the Beer and Liquor Distributors. The court held that its finding that the dispute was not arbitrable because Pabst was not a signatory to the agreement between the Union and the Beer and Liquor Distributors mandated the conclusion that Pabst employees have no rights under section 21.2 of the agreement. The Union appeals.
II.
The Union phrases the underlying disputed issue as follows: whether section 21.1 or section 21.2 governs the fate of Pabst employees following the acquisition of the Pabst Peoria area distribution operation by R.J. The resolution of this issue is dependent upon the proper interpretation of the phrase “party to this Agreement,” which is contained in both sections. The resolution of these issues, the Union claims, is resolution of the merits of the dispute. Under well-established principles of labor law, which limit a court’s authority to determining “whether the party seeking arbitration is making a claim which on its face is governed by the contract,” United Steelworkers v. American Manufacturing Co., 363 U.S. 564, 567-68, 80 S.Ct. 1343, 1346, 4 L.Ed.2d 1403 (1960), consideration of these issues was beyond the district court’s power. The district court, the Union contends, was limited to deciding whether these issues were subject to arbitration under the arbitration provisions of the agreement as “controversies ... over the interpretation” of the agreement. The Union argues that the court erred in basing its arbitrability determination on its interpretation of sections 21.1 and 21.2, the substantive provisions of the agreement that are the focus of the dispute.
Although suggesting in its brief that the issues of arbitrability and the appropriate resolution of the merits of the underlying dispute were sufficiently distinct to permit the district court to rule on the former without becoming entangled in the latter, at oral argument, the Union, relying on this court’s recent decision in Communication Workers of America v. Western Electric Co., 751 F.2d 203 (7th Cir.1984), argued that we should compel arbitration of the arbitrability issue as well as the underlying dispute because a decision on arbitrability in this case necessarily involves interpretation of the substantive provisions of the agreement, i.e., the merits of the dispute.
Citing section 13.5 of the agreement, R.J. retorts that an arbitrator has the authority to consider only grievances arising “under this Agreement.” Because the Union filed the grievance on behalf of former Pabst employees who never worked under the R. J.-Union agreement, the grievance cannot be deemed to arise under that agreement. R.J. urges us to reject the Union’s contention that an arbitrability determination that concomitantly effects a resolution of the underlying dispute is always an impermissible decision on the merits.
It is axiomatic that arbitration is a matter of contract. A party cannot be forced to submit to arbitration a dispute that it has not consented to submit. United Steelworkers of America v. Warrior & Gulf Navigation Co., 363 U.S. 574, 582, 80 S.Ct. 1347, 1352, 4 L.Ed.2d 1409 (1960). The federal court’s task is to ascertain from the contract whether the reluctant party agreed to arbitrate the grievance. As a general rule, if the contract is susceptible of an interpretation that the dispute is arbitrable, arbitration should be ordered. But if the court is positively assured that the contract is not susceptible of such an interpretation, arbitration cannot be ordered.
Under the agreement between the Union and R.J., a grievance is implicitly defined in section 13.1 as “any controversy ... over the interpretation, application, or working conditions covered by [the] agreement, which cannot be settled verbally by the employee and the Company.” The arbitrator has the authority “to consider only grievances presenting an arbitrable issue under [the] agreement.” Arbitrable issues, then, are controversies over the interpretation, application, or working conditions covered by the agreement which cannot be settled either verbally by the company and the employee or in a meeting between the Union’s business agent and a company representative.
We think it beyond peradventure that only disputes between parties to the agreement, that is, the signatory companies and the Union in its capacity as representative of their employees, are arbitrable under the agreement. The collective bargaining agreement at issue governs the employment relationship between “the undersigned Beer and Liquor Distributors,” including R.J., and their employees. Pabst admittedly was not a signatory to this agreement; rather it negotiated and executed a separate agreement with the Union. The Pabst-Union agreement alone covered Pabst employees. Pabst employees acquired no rights under the R.J.-Union agreement that they could seek to enforce through its grievance-arbitration mechanism.
True, the Union represents Pabst employees as well as R.J. employees but under separate agreements, separately negotiated. Commonality of representation is an insufficient basis for finding this dispute arbitrable under the R.J.-Union agreement. The Union is a party to that agreement, but only in its capacity as representative of the employees of the signatory companies. This representative capacity gives the Union standing under the agreement to assert the grievances of those employees. At the time the grievance was filed in this case, the employees on whose behalf the Union was pursuing the grievance were Pabst employees. The Union, in its capacity as representative of the Pabst employees, was not a party to the agreement it had negotiated and signed on behalf of the employees of those companies comprising the multiemployer bargaining unit of the Beer and Liquor Distributors.
The Union informs us that this court’s decision in Local 703, International Brotherhood of Teamsters v. Kennicott Bros. Co., 725 F.2d 1088 (7th Cir.1982), makes clear that the Union’s attempt to represent the interests of Pabst employees under the agreement between it and R.J. is not an appropriate basis for exempting the grievance from arbitration. We disagree that Kennicott is dispositive. Under the collective bargaining agreement between Kennicott Brothers and Local 703, Local 703 represented the “flower packers, wrappers, and stockmen.” The underlying dispute was whether the “bouquet makers” could be deemed to be either flower packers, wrappers or stockmen. True, the issue was representational in the sense that if bouquet makers were not found to be within one of these job categories, they would not be represented by the union. But there is a clear difference between the union’s attempt to represent the interests of production workers concededly employed by Kennicott and therefore arguably covered by the agreement between the parties and this Union’s attempt to represent the interests of Pabst workers concededly not then employed by R.J. and therefore not covered by the agreement between the Union and R.J. Kennicott essentially involved merely an in-house squabble over the proper classification of certain production workers, a dispute that clearly arose under the collective bargaining agreement. The instant case, in stark contrast, involves an attempt to pursue a grievance on behalf of persons not employed by the company with whom the Union had contracted.
Nor is our holding in conflict with our recent decision in Western Electric. In that case, we sent the arbitrability issue to the arbitrator because there were colorable arguments both for and against exclusion of the issue from arbitration, the resolution of which would require interpretation of less than clear substantive provisions. 751 F.2d at 207. Here, there is no colorable argument against exclusion of the issue from arbitration. Nor do we need to interpret any substantive provision of the agreement to decide whether this dispute is arbitrable. We need only look to the introductory paragraph of the agreement which makes clear that the agreement was entered into by the Union and the undersigned companies. Pabst was not a signatory to the agreement. It follows that Pabst employees were not covered by the agreement and have no standing to enforce its arbitration provisions.
We see no reasoned basis for distinguishing between a signatory to the agreement and a party to the agreement; they are one and the same, and Pabst is neither. Pabst employees therefore have no right to follow the work or retain the seniority acquired with Pabst. The Union’s argument that the sale of assets provisions are meaningless if not enforceable against the successor company is unavailing. Had the Union wanted to protect successfully the interests of Pabst employees following a sale by Pabst of its distribution operation, it should have bargained for such protection in its agreement with Pabst. It did not. Neither this court nor an arbitrator can now remedy that failure.
AFFIRMED.

Question: What is the total number of appellants in the case that fall into the category "natural persons"? Answer with a number.
Answer:

Answer: 0