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 "private business and its executives". 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.

Opinion:
BANCO CREDITO y AHORRO PONCENO, Petitioner, v. NATIONAL LABOR RELATIONS BOARD, Respondent.
No. 7001.
United States Court of Appeals First Circuit.
March 7, 1968.
William Lespier and Miguel Palou Sab-ater, Hato Rey, P. R., with whom Cohen & Lespier, Hato Rey, P. R., was on brief, for petitioner.
Norton J. Come, Asst. Gen. Counsel, with whom Arnold Ordman, Gen. Counsel, Dominick L. Manoli, Asst. Gen. Counsel, Marcel Mallet-Prevost, Asst. Gen. Counsel, and Nancy M. Sherman and Leon M. Kestenbaum, Washington, D. C., Attorneys, were on brief, for respondent.
Before ALDRICH, Chief Judge, Mc-ENTEE and COFFIN, Circuit Judges.
PER CURIAM.
The petitioner, Banco Crédito y Ahor-ro Ponceno (Bank), of Puerto Rico, seeks to set aside a National Labor Relations Board order based on a finding that the Bank had violated sections 8(a) (5) and (1) of the National Labor Relations Act, 29 U.S.C. § 151 et seq., in refusing to recognize and bargain with International Brotherhood of Boilermakers, Iron Shipbuilders, Blacksmiths, Forgers and Helpers, District Lodge 3 of Puerto Rico, AFL-CIO (Union). The Board seeks to enforce the same order.
The Bank’s major contention is that it was not obligated to bargain with the Union, even after election and certification, because the Board had improperly designated the employees of one of its 29 branches — Arecibo—as an appropriate bargaining unit. The Bank argues that the evidence of its island-wide, integrated, centrally controlled system, with uniform policies and standards and corresponding lack of authority in local branch managers precluded the Board from making substantiated findings that one branch was an appropriate unit. It also charges the Board with failure to articulate its rationale and with inconsistency in designating, following a consolidated representation hearing, 13 branch offices in the San Juan metropolitan area as another appropriate unit.
Despite the length of briefs and record, the relevant facts can be briefly summarized. The Bank’s Board of Directors and Operations Committee determine policy including labor relations policy. Services are administered from centralized departments, most of which are in San Juan. Branches must make daily reports of cash positions. Check clearance is of course done centrally. Branch managers have no decision-making authority over FHA and construction loans and must adhere to consumer loan limits set by the Board and, in the case of employee loans, to $1,000. Employees are under a bank-wide classification system, with uniform salaries, hours, and fringe benefits.
Branch managers, on the other hand, supervise employees on a day-to-day basis, recommend employees for pay increases, promotions, transfers, discipline, and discharge. While this authority is described as that of recommending, a bank witness had heard of only three or four cases in one year where the branch manager’s recommendations were not followed. Branch managers have the responsibilities of explaining new policies to employees, assigning overtime work, establishing vacation schedules, and resolving minor employee grievances.
The Areeibo branch is almost forty miles from San Juan and is reached by automobile in one to one and a quarter hours. It is sixteen miles from the nearest branch office. Of 206 employee transfers in two and one half years, only two involved Areeibo. Unlike some other branches, Areeibo does its own record-keeping and posting.
The Bank, on these facts and at this appellate stage, faces a most difficult task. It cannot succeed only by demonstrating that a system-wide unit would be appropriate but must also show that a branch unit is clearly not appropriate. Mueller Brass Co. v. NLRB, 86 U.S.App.D.C. 153, 180 F.2d 402 (1950). The broad discretion lodged in the Board, the limited scope of review, the Act’s policy of assuring freedom to employees in exercising their right to organize all add to the task. In this case we cannot say that the Board’s decision was not supported by evidence, misconceived the law, was an abuse of its discretion, or was inadequately articulated. See General Instrument Corp. v. NLRB, 319 F.2d 420, 422 (4th Cir. 1963), cert. denied, 375 U.S. 966, 84 S.Ct. 484, 11 L.Ed.2d 415 (1964).
The real albeit limited authority of the branch manager as to matters of immediate importance to employees, the relative remoteness of the branch, the almost complete absence of interchange of personnel between Areeibo and other parts of the system together justify the Board’s designation of the Areeibo unit.
Our own decision in NLRB v. Purity Food Stores, Inc., 376 F.2d 497 (1st Cir.), cert denied, 389 U.S. 959, 88 S.Ct. 337, 19 L.Ed.2d 368 (1967), does not stand for the proposition that central policy-making in a chain precludes a single unit determination. The facts before us relating to the management and labor situation in the Areeibo branch are more comparable to those in such cases as NLRB v. Sun Drug Co., 359 F.2d 408 (3d Cir. 1966); NLRB v. Merner Lumber & Hardware Co., 345 F.2d 770 (9th Cir. 1965); NLRB v. Winn-Dixie Stores, Inc., 341 F.2d 750 (6th Cir. 1965) ; Harris Langenberg Hat Co. v. NLRB, 216 F.2d 146 (8th Cir. 1954); and NLRB v. Stanolind Oil Co., 208 F.2d 239 (10th Cir. 1953), none of which was reckoned with in the Bank’s briefs.
That the Board saw fit to designate 13 branches in the San Juan metropolitan area as a “clearly defined, geographically coherent grouping sufficiently inclusive and compact to make collective bargaining in a single unit feasible” does not manifest any inconsistency with its Are-cibo decision. See NLRB v. Frisch’s Big Boy Ill-Mar Inc., 356 F.2d 895, 896 n. 3 (7th Cir. 1966). We note that over half of the Bank’s total employee transfers over the period we have referred to occurred within this area.
The Bank also challenged the election which was held subsequent to the designation of the Areeibo unit on the ground that the Board agent conducting the election entered the Bank on the day of election in the company of two Union representatives, and asked both the officials of the Bank and representatives of the Union to leave the premises during the election. The Bank also complains that it was entitled to a hearing in the unfair labor practice proceeding because it wished to challenge the authenticity of letters purporting to state why it was doing what it obviously did, i. e., refuse to bargain. These arguments we pass as being the by-products of understandable, if unrestrained, advocacy.
Petition to review and set aside the Board’s order is denied and said order may be enforced.

Question: What is the total number of appellants in the case that fall into the category "private business and its executives"? Answer with a number.

Choices:

Answer: 1