Opinion ID: 778054
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: The Employment Dispute

Text: 2 Between April 1996 and November 1, 1999, Plaintiff worked part-time for Permanente as a cytotechnologist. In that capacity, she examined slides from PAP smears to determine whether the tests revealed any cellular irregularities. She worked under the terms of a collective bargaining agreement (the Agreement) between Permanente and the Union, in which the parties agreed to resolve disputes through procedures that ultimately led to binding arbitration. The Union pursued claims on behalf of its members. 3 As a matter of course, whenever a patient had a positive PAP smear, Permanente reviewed all negative slides from the immediately preceding five years for that patient. During one (or more) of those regular five-year reviews, Permanente discovered four misreadings by Plaintiff. She had deemed the slides within normal limits but, in fact, the slides revealed highgrade abnormalities. The four misreadings occurred between September 25, 1996, and November 21, 1997. 4 On November 1, 1999, upon discovering those four misreadings, Permanente terminated Plaintiff's employment. Plaintiff grieved her discharge under the procedures provided for in the Agreement and, ultimately, the dispute was submitted to an arbitrator. 5 At arbitration, the Union conceded that the four identified slides had been misread and that certain documents could be admitted in evidence. Among the stipulated documents were two written counseling memoranda that Permanente had issued after Plaintiff misread slides on two additional occasions. One memorandum was sent shortly after Plaintiff was hired in 1996, and the other was sent in September of 1998. The Union contended that Plaintiff had improved in response to the September 1998 counseling memorandum and argued that Permanente did not have just cause to terminate her for errors in slides read years earlier. 6 The arbitrator agreed with the Union. He noted that Permanente had no evidence of unsatisfactory work after September 1998 — the date of the last counseling memorandum. The arbitrator reinstated Plaintiff because, in his opinion, Permanente's evidence did not meet the just cause standard. However, he concluded that Permanente's evidence was sufficient to raise a legitimate question about Plaintiff's competence. The arbitrator declined to award back pay on the ground that it was necessary to impress upon Plaintiff the seriousness of the mistakes she had made, and the `serious consequences' of those mistakes.