Opinion ID: 4468208
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: The arbitrator exceeded the scope of his

Text: delegated authority when he injected the “operating need” restriction into the CBA. Manifestly disregarding the Hospital’s “final,” “exclusive[]” and “unilateral[]” right to schedule vacations, the arbitrator deviated far beyond the scope of his authority by force-feeding the “operating need” requirement into the CBA. To repeat, an arbitrator’s authority sources from the CBA itself. Here § 8(F)(3) makes clear that the arbitrator has no authority to “add to, detract from or alter in any way the provisions of [the CBA].” Yet that is what the arbitrator did in inserting the “operating need” restriction. It appears nowhere in the CBA. Instead, the arbitrator urges what he believes “should occur in the situation where a bargaining unit employee and his/her working supervisor . . . both desire the identical vacation;” the employee should prevail and “the working supervisor should not have a superior claim to the desired vacation week.” (Emphases added.) Thus, he concludes, “the Hospital may not reserve unto itself and the working supervisor the right to deny senior employees in the bargaining unit their desired vacation, when there is no operating need for the employee to be present during the desired vacation week because of skills, ability, and responsibilities that cannot also be performed by the working supervisor.” None of these policy pronouncements, however, can be found in the text of the CBA. Why “operating need” is absent stems from the parties’ bargaining history. The 1974 CBA provided that “each employee’s vacation period shall be designated by the Hospital to meet the requirement of operating conditions” (emphasis added), in effect the “operating need” restriction the arbitrator added here. In 1977, however, the CBA was modified to eliminate the operating-conditions restriction and to give the 10 final say to the Hospital to schedule vacations. That is the same language that is in the CBA governing this dispute. Moreover, in 2009 the Union sought a specific restriction to the CBA that “[n]on-bargaining unit employees will not be given vacation scheduling preference over bargaining unit employees,” but that amendment was rejected and never became a part of the agreement. App. 99, 43. Thus past becomes prologue in discovering the parties’ intent. Where an arbitrator injects a restriction into a contract to which the Hospital did not agree and to which the bargaining unit employees are not entitled, he dispenses his own brand of industrial justice and should be overturned. See Brentwood Medical Ass’n v. United Mine Workers, 396 F.3d 237, 241 (3d Cir. 2005) (noting that “it is within our discretion to vacate [an arbitration] award” when it is supported only by language the arbitrator injected into the CBA); Poland Spring Corp. v. United Food & Commercial Workers Int’l Union, Local 1445, 314 F.3d 29, 34–37 (1st Cir. 2002) (voiding an arbitration award for limiting a company’s termination powers with a made-up term: “mitigating circumstances”).