Opinion ID: 771050
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: the strike and subsequent recall of workers

Text: 6 Alaska Pulp owned a pulp processing mill in Sitka, Alaska. For approximately 27 years, the United Paper workers International Union, Local 962 represented production and maintenance employees at the Sitka plant. The employees participated in an economic strike from July 1986 to March 1987, when they voted in an NLRB-conducted election to decertify the union. 7 By the time the employees made an unconditional offer to return to work, Alaska Pulp had filled all of its nearly 300 strike-empty positions with permanent replacements and crossovers. See NLRB v. Mackay Radio & Tel. Co., 304 U.S. 333, 346-47 (1938) (an employer may hire permanent replacements during an economic strike). Consequently, the company placed many of those remaining strikers who had requested reinstatement, nearly 150 individuals, on a preferential recall list. This type of list is commonly known as a Laidlaw list after Laidlaw Corp. v. NLRB, 414 F.2d 99 (7th Cir. 1969) (holding that while an employer is not obligated to discharge permanent replacements to make room for returning economic strikers, the employer must place the former strikers on a preferential recall list). 8 Under non-strike circumstances, Alaska Pulp filled job openings within its production departments by promoting the next qualified employee up a departmental job ladder. This is how the Board explained the procedure: 9 [W]hen a vacancy occurs, the position is filled by the individual immediately below in the line of progression who, during the course of his work, will have previously received training in the next higher job. All the other individuals move up in automatic succession, thereby opening an entry level job for any one at any progression level in one of the other departments who may want to bid into the available entry level job. 10 Alaska Pulp Corp., 296 NLRB 1260, 1264 (1989) (footnote omitted). Even during the strike, Alaska Pulp filled vacancies by plugging permanent replacements and crossovers into the line-of-progression system. 11 However, there was no established procedure for bringing those who participated in the 1986-87 strike back to work. Alaska Pulp chose not to reinstate them as soon as their former or substantially equivalent positions became available. Supervisors instead evaluated each unreinstated employee and assigned him or her a numerical ranking within the employee's old department. 1 The company then placed each unreinstated employee on the Laidlaw list in ranked order. 12 As soon as a non-entry-level position opened after the strike, Alaska Pulp filled it by promoting the nonstriking, replacement, or crossover worker who was next in line pursuant to its automatic progression system. Each such promotion, of course, created a vacancy in the promoted worker's old job. If that vacancy was also a non-entry-level position, Alaska Pulp filled it by promoting the next junior nonstriking, replacement, or crossover worker. This successive-promotion procedure continued until it yielded an entry level opening. At that point, Alaska Pulp selected the returning striker from the Laidlaw list who had the highest ranking for the appropriate department and assigned him or her to the empty slot. 2 Numerous strikers were recalled to these entry level positions. 13