Opinion ID: 752139
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: Bargaining history: the Presidential Emergency Boards

Text: 15 So the railroads' position would be frivolous, if we could not incorporate sources of meaning beyond the Agreement itself. But we can; in fact, we must. The Supreme Court long ago ruled that courts should interpret collective bargaining agreements with a keen eye for the nuances of context. A collective bargaining agreement is not an ordinary contract for the purchase of goods and services, nor is it governed by the same old common-law concepts which control such private contracts. Transportation-Communication Employees Union v. Union Pac. R.R. Co., 385 U.S. 157, 160-61, 87 S.Ct. 369, 371, 17 L.Ed.2d 264 (1966); see also Southeastern Pa. Transp. Auth. v. Brotherhood of R.R. Signalmen, 882 F.2d 778, 784-85 (3d Cir.1989) (SEPTA). The assumptions courts make in reading a contract do not translate readily into the sphere of labor agreements. Contracts at common law are presumed to grow out of free choice, in the sense that there is no real compulsion [for the parties] to deal with one another, as opposed to dealing with other parties. United Steelworkers of Am. v. Warrior & Gulf Navigation Co., 363 U.S. 574, 580, 80 S.Ct. 1347, 1352, 4 L.Ed.2d 1409 (1960). Courts hold the parties to the letter of their contracts, because the parties affirmatively chose those words to structure a legal mini-universe out of the void. Collective bargaining agreements, in contrast, typically govern pre-existing relationships not easily broken and remade. For each side, the real options are governance by an agreed-upon rule of law or leaving each and every matter subject to a temporary resolution dependent solely upon the relative strength, at any given moment, of the contending forces. Id. Under these conditions, a labor agreement cannot be presumed to represent a true meeting of the minds. Conrail, 491 U.S. at 317, 109 S.Ct. at 2488. A collective bargaining agreement thus falls into a different order of legal instrument from an ordinary contract. Rather,  'it is a generalized code to govern a myriad of cases which the draftsmen cannot wholly anticipate.'  Conrail, 491 U.S. at 311-12, 109 S.Ct. at 2484-85 (quoting Warrior & Gulf, 363 U.S. at 578-79, 80 S.Ct. at 1350-51 (internal citation omitted)). 16 The notion of a meeting of the minds breaks down still further under the Railway Labor Act. The RLA takes as its primary goal to settle strikes and avoid interruptions to commerce. Burlington Northern R.R. Co. v. Brotherhood of Maintenance of Way Employes, 481 U.S. 429, 451, 107 S.Ct. 1841, 1854, 95 L.Ed.2d 381 (1987). This goal imposes a heavy duty upon railroads and unions alike to exert every reasonable effort ... to settle all disputes. 45 U.S.C. § 152, First. The RLA compels a railroad and a union to bargain, and to do so under the shadow of the emergency powers of the President and Congress. See, e.g., Burlington Northern, 481 U.S. at 452, 107 S.Ct. at 1854-55 (noting 1986 congressional intervention). Should the parties fail to agree to some text--any text--a real possibility exists of Congress' forcing its own solution. Under these circumstances, we cannot presume that the parties act at their peril if their wording is misleading, just as we would not read a statute or treaty as if the lawgiver or contracting powers drafted their text under strict liability. 17 The railroads and the union did not negotiate Article XIV in a vacuum, and we will not act as if they had. For collective bargaining agreements under the RLA, we must look beyond the document itself. We must look to the parties' practice, usage and custom. Union Pac. R.R. Co., 385 U.S. at 161, 87 S.Ct. at 371. We must look to parallel labor agreements, even those involving other parties. Id. And in this case we must look to a portion of the bargaining history. But such extrinsic evidence cannot be used to contradict the express provisions of a written contract. Brotherhood of Ry., Airline & S.S. Clerks v. Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Ry., 847 F.2d 403, 406 n. 2 (7th Cir.1988). The RLA may direct us to look beyond the agreement, but it does not free either party from the consequences of assenting to a text. Our purpose instead is to ascertain whether the ostensible meaning of Article XIV--lucid and definitive as it might seem--is in fact the right one. This is a court's responsibility to some extent even under contract law, where a court may unveil a latent ambiguity through extrinsic evidence. Bank of the United States v. Dunn, 31 U.S. 51, 54, 6 Pet. 51, 8 L.Ed. 316 (1832) (noting this exception to parol evidence rule); FDIC v. W.R. Grace & Co., 877 F.2d 614, 620-21 (7th Cir.1989); DeKalb Bank v. Purdy, 166 Ill.App.3d 709, 117 Ill.Dec. 606, 520 N.E.2d 957, 963 (1988). A federal court must enjoy at least the same authority under the RLA. See, e.g., SEPTA, 882 F.2d at 783 (a court may look to side letter agreements, policy statements and any other evidence of the intent of the parties which may properly be considered). 1 18 Here the railroads point to a single slice of the bargaining history, the hearings and report of Presidential Emergency Board 229. It is a particularly apposite slice for our purposes, because the negotiators took a chunk of PEB 229's report and inserted it word-for-word in the Agreement as Article XIV. The bargaining history hence is of a peculiar sort. There is a danger in opening the door too wide to extrinsic evidence, so that the next judge will have to confront illegible notes scribbled on a bar napkin, or testimony about the musings of coffee-sated negotiators at 2 a.m. But that danger is not present here. We have a manageable and definable set of documents, collected from an official hearing, from which the parties drew the language at issue in this case. If an ambiguity is asserted to exist beneath the surface of that text, we cannot believe that Congress would have us blind ourselves to what its original drafters meant to say. 19 In a moment we will consider what this extrinsic evidence reveals; but first we must explain why we cannot adopt the railroads' rationale for consulting it. The issue before us is whether the tussle over travel allowances is a major or minor dispute. The railroads say that the way to resolve this question is to ask what an arbitrator might do. If an arbitrator might rule for the railroads, then that's it--the dispute is minor and it must go to arbitration. That a court should put on an arbitrator's hat has some intuitive appeal. The content of an agreement depends as a practical matter on who is going to interpret it and how she will do so. If an agreement's drafters know that arbitrators will likely interpret things in way X (say, by looking at bargaining history) and not way Y, then that knowledge will inform what the drafters set down on paper and how they expect it to be seen. 20 Yet mimicking arbitrators is not what Congress commanded us to do. Congress committed the classification of RLA disputes to federal judges, not to arbitrators; and we have no warrant to cede that commission de facto. Nowhere do we find a suggestion by Congress or the Supreme Court (or the inferior courts, for that matter) endorsing the railroads' proposal. This absence is telling, for the initial charm of the railroads' position dissolves on further inspection. The rulings of arbitrators are subject to judicial review of an especially narrow kind. Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers v. Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Ry. Co., 768 F.2d 914, 921 (7th Cir.1985) (Perhaps 'review' is a misnomer.). This brand of judicial review guards against only the arbitrator run amok. Arbitral awards that fall short of that berserk level, even if rash, foolish and ill-advised, must stand. They thus would make a poor source of law for courts to tap in distinguishing major and minor disputes. (Though facially neutral, the railroads' attempt to elide the major/minor test with the judicial review test would work to their favor. The railroads would define a minor dispute as anything fitting into the gamut of arbitral awards that can survive judicial review. Given the deference paid even to slapdash awards, the class of major disputes would dwindle to meager proportions indeed.) To pin judicial rulings to the vagaries of nearly unconstrained awards would also suffer from a subtler but perhaps graver defect. For the classification of RLA disputes, the railroads would have us put the cart before the horse. It is for the judges to say what the law is, not for the arbitrators. The tether that binds arbitrators to judicial rulings may be a loose one, but the pull is from the judges to the arbitrators, not the other way around. 21 But even if for the wrong reasons, the railroads are right: the district court should have examined the bargaining history of PEB 229. That history comprises the Presidential Emergency Board's report and the parties' written and oral submissions. There the railroads claim to find proof positive that when the PEB drafted the future Article XIV, the Board thought that the union's overarching concern was regional and system gangs. With this we readily agree. When PEB 229 pronounced its understanding of the union's general contentions, it explicitly linked the issue of travel allowances to regional and system gangs, not all traveling employees. See JA-0362. The PEB also explained the union's specific proposal on travel allowances in terms of regional and system gangs. 2 JA-0369. In several instances the union itself straightforwardly framed the issue of travel allowances around the regional and system gangs. The starkest example was the presentation to the PEB by the union's director of arbitration. He began by set[ting] forth three fundamental proposals. Here is what we are after, here is what the [union] wants out of this proposal, he said. The first two requests had to do with meals and lodging; the third with travel allowances. Third, we believe maintenance-of-way employees should not be required to subsidize the carriers' most productive gangs, by traveling long hours without pay or travel expense to work on the gangs. JA-0646. Uncompensated travel time for regional and system gang members in particular came up again when the union's general counsel addressed the PEB. JA-0628, 0634, 0635. There are further instances we might repeat, but the point is made. JA-0442, 0568, 0572. 22 From this the railroads would have us infer that the PEB's recommendation about travel allowances referred strictly to regional and system gangs. This one is harder to swallow. The PEB's recommendation is, of course, silent on this point. The railroads' submissions to the PEB themselves do not support their case: they sometimes speak in the broad language the unions urge today, as if allowances for all traveling employees were at stake. JA-0661-63; 0673-78; 0714; 0726-27. The union's brief to the PEB on Expenses Away from Home seems to encompass all traveling employees on the issue of travel allowances, albeit with some ambiguity. JA-0411, 0414. But see JA-0444. 23 That the PEB's recommendations, as swept into Article XIV of the Agreement, referred to all traveling employees (and not just regional and system gangs) seems to us plausible, maybe even probable. For the union to prevail under the RLA, however, the evidence must do more than tilt; it must slide into a heap on one side. Railway Labor Executives Ass'n v. Norfolk and W. Ry. Co., 833 F.2d at 705 (Because a major dispute can escalate into a strike, if there is any doubt as to whether a dispute is major or minor a court will construe the dispute to be minor.); see also General Comm. of Adjustment, United Transp. Union, W. Md. Ry. Co. v. CSX R.R. Corp., 893 F.2d 584, 591 (3d Cir.1990) (close cases to be treated as minor). The evidence is not so lopsided. Based on what the PEB said and how the parties had cast their views before it, we think that a latent ambiguity may exist in the Agreement, namely that the PEB meant only to refer to regional and system gangs. The railroads' interpretation therefore is arguably justifiable and not frivolous. See Conrail, 491 U.S. at 320, 109 S.Ct. at 2489-90 (noting employer bears only light burden in establishing arbitral jurisdiction, the meeting of which in no way suggests employer is entitled to prevail before the Board on the merits of the dispute). The dispute is minor and the judgment of the district court is R EVERSED. The case is R EMANDED with directions for the district court (1) to dismiss the union's suit (Dist. Ct. No. 96 C 1515) for lack of subject matter jurisdiction, and (2) to enter judgment for Norfolk Southern Railway Co. and Norfolk and Western Railway Co. on their suit (Dist. Ct. No. 96 C 1524) for declaratory and injunctive relief. 24