Opinion ID: 419940
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Implication of a Just Cause Bar to Discharge

Text: 11 We are mindful, as we begin our analysis of the issue presented by the case at bar,that judicial interpretation of silence in a document ... is always a tricky and controversial undertaking.... This is especially true with labor contracts, since their formation is typically characterized by intense bargaining and the final contract usually represents hard-fought negotiations and compromises. Quite often, employers and unions exchange numerous quid pro quos, giving clauses and rights in direct exchange. 12 N.L.R.B. v. South Central Bell Telephone Co., 688 F.2d 345, 352-53 (5th Cir.1982). Labor contracts in general state affirmatively the conditions on which the parties agree. Id. at 353 (citing Torrington Co. v. Metal Prods. Workers Local 1645, 362 F.2d 677 (7th Cir.1966)); Rainbow Glass Co. v. Local Union No. 610, 663 F.2d 814 (8th Cir.1981). Contractual silence, by the same token, is not dispositive of the intent of the parties. N.L.R.B. v. South Central Bell Telephone Co.; Amcar Division, ACF Indus., Inc. v. N.L.R.B., 592 F.2d 422 (8th Cir.1979). As the Supreme Court has recognized, a collective bargaining agreement may not anticipate every situation that may arise between employer and employee. United Steel Workers of America v. Warrior & Gulf Navigation Co.; see Cronin v. Sears, Roebuck & Co., 588 F.2d 616 (8th Cir.1978). A collective bargaining agreement, in the Court's estimation: 13 is more than a contract; it is a generalized code to govern a myriad of cases which the draftsman cannot wholly anticipate.... The collective agreement covers the whole employment relationship. It calls into being a new common law--the common law of a particular industry or of a particular plant.... one observer has put it: 14 ... [I]t is not unqualifiedly true that a collective-bargaining agreement is simply a document by which the union and employees have imposed upon management limited, express restrictions of its otherwise absolute right to manage the enterprise, so that an employee's claim must fail unless he can point to a specific contract provision upon which the claim is founded. There are too many people, too many problems, too many unforeseeable contingencies to make the words of the contract the exclusive source of rights and duties. One cannot reduce all the rules governing a community like an industrial plant to fifteen or even fifty pages. Within the sphere of collective bargaining, the institutional characteristics and the governmental nature of the collective-bargaining process demand a common law of the shop which implements and furnishes the context of the agreement. We must assume that intelligent negotiators acknowledged so plain a need unless they stated a contrary rule in plain words. 15 United Steelworkers of America v. Warrior's Gulf Navigation Co., 363 U.S. at 578-80, 80 S.Ct. at 1350-52 (quoting from Cox, Reflections Upon Labor Arbitration, 72 Harv.L.Rev. 1482, 1498-99 (1959)). 16 Because a collective bargaining agreement is designed to regulate virtually all facets of the employer-employee relationship, and is subject to federal labor law, the construction and application of its terms cannot be narrowly confined by ordinary principles of contract law. See Transportation-Communication Employees Union v. Union Pacific Railroad, 385 U.S. 157, 87 S.Ct. 369, 17 L.Ed.2d 264 (1966); N.L.R.B. v. L.B. Priester, 669 F.2d 355 (5th Cir.1982). Thus the provisions of a labor contract may be more readily expanded by implication than those of contracts memorializing other transactions. Local 205, United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America v. General Electric Co., 172 F.Supp. 53 (D.Mass.1959). See generally R. Gorman, Basic Text on Labor Law 540-41 (1976 ed.). 17 In instances where the language of a collective contract does not explicitly prohibit dismissal except for just cause, arbitrators typically infer such prohibitions from seniority clauses or grievance and arbitration procedures. Summers, Individual Protection Against Unjust Dismissal: Time For A Statute, 62 Va.L.Rev. 481, 499-500 (1976). See Shearson Hayden Stone, Inc. v. Liang, 653 F.2d 310 (7th Cir.1981); Note, Protecting At-Will Employees Against Wrongful Discharge, the Duty to Terminate Only in Good Faith, 93 Harv.L.Rev. 1816, 1816 (1980); Note, Individual Rights for Organized and Unorganized Employees Under the National Labor Relations Act, 58 Tex.L.Rev. 991, 994 (1980). Inherent in the body of arbitral common law which has evolved in this context is a marked awareness of the harshness of discharge, and an adherence to the principle that seniority, grievance, arbitration, and other provisions that reflect the contracting parties' tacit acceptance of the employees' right to some measure of job security, pretermit discharge without good cause. See RLC & Son Trucking, Inc., 70 LA 600 (1978); Peerless Laundry Co., 51 LA 333 (1968); Keeney Mfg. Co., 40 LA 976 (1963); Pacific Telephone & Telegraph Co., 36 LA 503 (1960). See also M. Trotta, Arbitration of Labor-Management Disputes 230-42 (1974); Summers. 2 One arbiter summarizes this development as follows: The weight of arbitral opinion is that a standard of just cause may be imposed upon disciplinary actions even though such a standard is not spelled out in the agreement. Pacific Telephone & Telegraph Co., 36 LA at 505. 18 Several courts, in reviewing an arbitral finding of a just cause impediment to discharge, have determined that the arbitrator properly circumscribed the employer's power to fire by implying an objective limitation from the terms of the labor contract, as amplified by evidence of the parties' intentions. See e.g., Shearson Hayden Stone, Inc. v. Liang (arbitrator empowered to determine that agreement to arbitrate disputes concerning employee discharges implies just cause requirement); United Food & Commercial Workers International, AFL-CIO, Local Union No. 634 v. Gold Sausage Co., 487 F.Supp. 596 (D.Colo.1980) (upholding arbitrator's implication, by reference to seniority clause governing layoffs, rehiring, transfers and promotions, and the proscription of discharge for refusing to cross or work behind picket lines, of contractual removal of employer's unilateral right to terminate without cause. The court relied in part on the Supreme Court's disapprobation of the exclusion from arbitration of any grievance, including those stemming from discharge); Local 205, United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America v. General Electric Co. (after evaluating labor contract's machinery for the adjustment of grievances relating to dismissal for cause other than layoffs for lack of work against historical background which injected meaning in this phrase, the court declined to disturb the arbitral finding that the contract permitted dismissal only for reasonable or objective cause). See also Monaghan v. Central Vermont Ry., Inc., 404 F.Supp. 683 (D.Mass.1975) (enforcement of National Railroad Adjustment Board's reinstatement order, holding that Board's implication of just cause stricture from contractual grievance process did not modify or amend the labor contract). Similarly, the courts examine the contractual language and the parties' understanding thereof, as manifested by their conduct and the common law of the plant or shop, in deciding whether a just cause restriction on management's dismissal power is embedded in the terms of the collective bargaining agreement. See, e.g., Lowe v. Pate Stevedoring Co.; Boone v. Armstrong Cork Co., 384 F.2d 285 (5th Cir.1967); Young v. Southwestern Bell Telephone Co., 309 F.Supp. 475, 479 (E.D.Ark.1969), aff'd, 424 F.2d 256 (8th Cir.1970). 19 In Lowe, we upheld the district court's finding of an implied just cause provision, stating that this  'limitation upon the employer's right to discharge its employees should be inferred as a part of the basic fabric of the collective bargaining agreement.'  558 F.2d at 771 n. 3 (quoting from district court's unpublished opinion). Notwithstanding the inclusion of an arbitration clause in the agreement, both the trial and appellate courts relied solely on a union hiring hall arrangement in circumscribing management's right to discharge. 20 Detailed provisions in labor contracts for the processing of grievances arising from employee terminations may, in some circumstances, justify the implication of a just cause requirement. Boone v. Armstrong Cork Co. Without deciding the issue, we opined in Boone that a grievance procedure, coupled with clauses providing for seniority rights and permissive dismissals of probationary employees, might be read to proscribe: 21 the termination of an employee who had established seniority without just cause, reasons therefor, or designation of certain conduct warranting discipline, and that the company may be required, through the grievance procedure, to justify such terminations. 22 384 F.2d at 291 n. 8. 23 In an opinion adopted in its entirety by our colleagues of the Eighth Circuit, the trial court refused to imply a just cause requirement where the collective bargaining agreement dealt expressly with the effect of tenure on employee terminations. Young v. Southwestern Bell Telephone Co. Employees with more than three years' service were accorded the right of pre-dismissal arbitration at the final level of the contract's grievance machinery, whereas those employed less than three years could pursue only the first two levels prior to discharge. That the older employees alone could compel arbitration prompted the court to conclude that the employer retained the ultimate authority to discharge individuals with less than three years' service after granting them access to the initial levels of the grievance process. For purposes of discussion, however, the court assumed that: 24 if ... an employer and a labor union enter into a collective bargaining agreement giving large consideration to seniority and length of service but which is silent as to the employer's right to hire and fire, there may properly be read into the contract an implied covenant not to discharge an employee except for cause. 25 309 F.Supp. at 478.