Opinion ID: 399272
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 4

Heading: giving effect to an arbitrator's decision as the

Text: 42 AUTHORITATIVE INTERPRETATION OF THE NO-STRIKE CLAUSE 43 We need not engage in an unaided examination of the contract to determine whether Bethlehem and the IUMSW agreed that union officials could be more harshly punished. All we need decide is whether to give effect to an arbitration decision, construing the same no-strike clause at issue here but involving a different grievance claim. This arbitration decision explicitly held that union officials working under the Bethlehem-IUMSW agreement have higher duties during strikes than rank-and-file employees, and that breach of those duties may subject union officials to more severe discipline. 44 On June 5, 1978, Impartial Umpire Laurence E. Seibel rendered a binding arbitration decision based on facts virtually indistinguishable from those in the present case. 19 On July 7, 1977, seventeen employees in the Optical Detail Department at Bethlehem's Sparrows Point shipyard walked off the job. J.A. at 37-38. The rank-and-file employees who participated in the walkout were suspended for five days; the one union official who participated in the walkout, Shop Steward Gunkel, was suspended for ten days. Id. at 38. The disciplinary notice given to Gunkel stated that he was to be suspended for participating as Shop Steward in a work stoppage ... in violation of Article XXVIII (sic) of the Agreement. Id. The grievance submitted to arbitration, as umpire Seibel recognized, involved the questions (1) whether the walkout was in violation of the no-strike clause, (2) whether Steward Gunkel participated in the walkout and (3) whether the disparate penalty imposed on him was appropriate. Id. at 42. 45 Umpire Seibel found that the walkout was a concerted action by the employees in protest of Bethlehem's temporary assignment of a non-bargaining-unit employee to work in the Optical Detail Department. Id. at 49. Accordingly, he found that the walkout was a violation of the no-strike clause. Id. at 49-50. Seibel further found that Steward Gunkel did in fact participate in the walkout. Id. Next Seibel turned to the issue of Gunkel's disparate punishment. His discussion of this point merits quotation at length: 46 (T)here is no evidence that Gunkel, as a Shop Steward, took any action whatsoever to discourage the men from leaving and while he may well have not been the instigator nevertheless his inactivity could well be viewed as an encouragement or at least as representing tacit approval of what was happening. As Shop Steward he was under an obligation to seek to dissuade the employees in the shop under his jurisdiction from taking any illegal work stoppage action and evidence in this regard that he did so is completely lacking. In my opinion, Grievant Gunkel's action or lack of actions cannot be regarded in the same vein as that of other employees. He had a greater obligation than they to make an effort to preclude violation of the Agreement and in this respect he failed to meet such obligation. Accordingly, the imposition of an additional five day suspension does not appear to me to be unwarr(a)nted. 47 Id. at 50 (emphasis added). 48 Despite the contentions of the Board and Fournelle to the contrary, the decision interpreted the agreement 20 to allow Bethlehem to selectively discipline union officials who disobey the no-strike clause. The decision did more than determine the fairness of a single act of discipline meted out to a single employee: it clearly rested on the premise that union officials have a greater obligation ... to make an effort to preclude violation of the contractual no-strike provision. Breach of this obligation, Seibel concluded, merited selective discipline of the offending union official. 49 The meaning of the arbitrator's award is clear. 21 The remaining question is whether the award should have been accorded precedential effect by the Board. If the award should be given precedential effect, our inquiry need go no further: if the collective bargaining agreement authorized Bethlehem's selective discipline of Fournelle, then, for the reasons given in the preceding section, the Board erred in finding that discipline to constitute an unfair labor practice. But the Board and Fournelle argue that, because the contract does not explicitly provide that the arbitrator's decisions will be precedentially binding in later arbitrations, this court should ignore Umpire Seibel's decision. 50 This argument finds some support in the recent decision of the Third Circuit in Metropolitan Edison Co. v. NLRB, 663 F.2d 478 (3rd Cir. 1981). In that case the court affirmed the NLRB's finding of an employer's unfair labor practice under sections 8(a)(1) and (3). The employer had imposed disparately severe suspensions on two union officials who violated the no-strike clause of the collective bargaining agreement. The employer contended that the union officials had higher duties than the rank and file to prevent strikes during the contract term. In earlier arbitrations, the court noted, the union had twice grieved to arbitration the issue of whether the Company could impose the extra discipline, and twice the Union lost. Id. at 480. The court found, however, that the language of the contract itself did not explicitly provide for such harsher discipline, and the court refused to be bound by the arbitral awards construing the collective bargaining agreement to place greater responsibilities on union officials. Id. at 483. The court in Metropolitan Edison buttressed its refusal to be bound by the earlier decisions with the citation of authority holding that courts may not set aside arbitral decisions on the ground that the arbitrator failed to accord precedential value to earlier arbitral awards. 22 See id. But we are not concerned in the present case with the question whether a party who is disappointed by an arbitral award may attempt to avoid that award in court by pointing to a departure from arbitral precedent, and we have no quarrel with authority rebuffing such attempts. The question here is whether, on the one hand, the Board and courts should read the agreement in accordance with the clear ruling of the arbitrator or, on the other hand, should substitute their interpretation for the arbitrator's. We conclude, for the reasons set out below, that the Board erred in ignoring the arbitral interpretation of the contract. 51 The Supreme Court recognized in the Steelworkers Trilogy that arbitration is an essential part of the collective bargaining process. The Court explained in Steelworkers v. Warrior & Gulf Navigation Co., 363 U.S. 574, 580, 80 S.Ct. 1347, 1351, 4 L.Ed.2d 1409 (1960), that (a) collective bargaining agreement is an effort to erect a system of industrial self-government. Because of the complexity of the relationship between union and employer, and because of the overriding need of the parties to reach an agreement, (g)aps may be left to be filled in by reference to the practices of the particular industry and of the various shops covered by the agreement. Id. Unlike commercial arbitration, where arbitration may be a symptom of the breakdown of the parties' relationship, the grievance machinery under a collective bargaining agreement is at the very heart of the system of industrial self-government. Id. at 581, 80 S.Ct. at 1352. The processing of disputes through the grievance machinery is actually a vehicle by which meaning and content are given to the collective bargaining agreement. Id. Thus the arbitrator's rulings may be as important a source of the rights and obligations of the parties as the contractual document itself. Moreover, (t)he labor arbitrator's source of law is not confined to the express provisions of the contract, as the industrial common law-the practices of the industry and the shop-is equally a part of the collective bargaining agreement although not expressed in it. Id. at 581-82, 80 S.Ct. at 1352-53. To put it succinctly: (a)n award interpreting a collective bargaining agreement usually becomes a binding part of the agreement and will be applied by arbitrators thereafter. F. Elkouri & E. Elkouri, How Arbitration Works 377 (1973) (footnote omitted). 52 Thus, it is simply inconsistent with the realities of labor arbitration to maintain that, without an express contractual term giving the results of past arbitrations precedential effect, the arbitrator's rulings are isolated utterances without a general application to the ongoing collective bargaining relationship. This is especially true, as in the present case, of arbitration awards rendered by permanent umpires. As recognized by a respected authority on the arbitral process, (t)he most pronounced situation in which prior arbitration awards have 'authoritative' type force is that of arbitration by permanent umpires or chairmen. F. Elkouri & E. Elkouri, supra, at 374. Indeed, in the decisions of the umpires selected to decide grievances at Bethlehem's Sparrows Point shipyard, we find an adherence to arbitral precedent that is as scrupulous as a court's application of the doctrine of stare decisis. E.g., Bethlehem Steel Co., Shipbuilding Division, Sparrows Point Yard v. Industrial Union of Marine & Shipbuilding Workers Local 33, 43 Lab.Arb. (BNA) 228, 230 (1964) (Crawford, Arb.) (precedent regarding consequences of erroneous seniority lists); Bethlehem Steel Co., Shipbuilding Division, Sparrows Point Yard v. Industrial Union of Marine & Shipbuilding Workers Local 35, 41 Lab.Arb. (BNA) 587, 589-90 (1963) (Crawford, Arb.) (precedent regarding meaning of contract term allowing extra compensation for unusually dirty work). 53 The parties to the collective bargaining agreement in the present case would no doubt be highly displeased if arbitral stare decisis were as inconstant a doctrine as Fournelle and the Board would have us believe. The whole function of arbitration as a vehicle by which meaning and content are given to the collective bargaining agreement would be impaired if the parties could not rely on a settled construction of their agreement. It is instructive to note that neither of the parties to this agreement-Bethlehem and the IUMSW-has challenged Umpire Seibel's construction of the no-strike clause. Bethlehem, as is hardly surprising, has maintained throughout that the agreement means what the umpire said; it is perhaps more significant that the IUMSW has not attempted to challenge the validity of Fournelle's suspension. 54 Therefore, we hold that the Board was not free either to ignore the meaning of the contract or to substitute its own interpretation of the contract for the interpretation of the arbitrator. 23 As the Supreme Court stated in NLRB v. C & C Plywood Corp., 385 U.S. 421, 87 S.Ct. 559, 17 L.Ed.2d 486 (1967): 55 To have conferred upon the National Labor Relations Board generalized power to determine the rights of parties under all collective agreements would have been a step toward governmental regulation of the terms of those agreements. We view Congress' decision not to give the Board that broad power as a refusal to take this step. 56 Id. at 427-28, 87 S.Ct. at 563 (footnote omitted). Of course, the Court has recognized that the Board has a limited power to interpret the agreement when such interpretation is necessary to the exercise of its jurisdiction to remedy unfair labor practices. Id. at 428-30, 87 S.Ct. at 563-65. But in the present case there was no such jurisdiction to exercise. We hold that the collective bargaining agreement, including the authoritative interpretation of the arbitrator, imposes special duties on union officials during unauthorized strikes and permits the employer's selective punishment of union officials who flout those duties. When the employer exercised his contractual right to discipline an offending union official, there was no unfair labor practice. The Board's intervention in such a case was an impermissible attempt to decide a contractual claim that (did) not involve an unfair labor practice. Kohls v. NLRB, 629 F.2d 173, 179 (D.C.Cir.1980), cert. denied, 450 U.S. 931, 101 S.Ct. 1390, 67 L.Ed.2d 363 (1981).