Opinion ID: 187157
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 5

Heading: Per Diem Expenses During National Conventions

Text: Noble's remaining § 501(a) claim concerns the payment of per diem allowances to Executive Council members during meetings of the biennial National Convention. NALC provides daily expense allowances to a small group of attendees at the Conventions to cover lost wages, hotel rooms, meals, and incidentals. (In 2002, for example, the allowance was $420 per day, based on $166.93 for lost time, $158.48 for hotels, and $94.59 for meals and incidentals.) The officers Noble named in this suit attended every Convention ex oficio and received per diem payments despite the fact that they lost no wages by attending and frequently stayed in free or reduced-rate rooms at the hotels hosting the Conventions. Noble alleges that the officers' acceptance of these per diems violated § 501 because they took union funds as reimbursements for expenses they did not actually incur. Noble further alleges that Convention delegates were misled as to the nature of the payments and that the officers gained Convention approval of their per diem payments without adequate disclosure. The NALC Const. art. 13, § 2 provides that [p]er diem shall be paid to each officer as the National Association, while in session, may direct and Article 11, § 6 directs that [t]he Committee on Mileage and Per Diem shall compute and report to the National Convention the name, residence, and amount due each member eligible for mileage and per diem. The district court found that in 1964 a majority of Convention delegates voted to dispense with the reading of the individual payees and substituted a procedure by which the Mileage and Per Diem Committee provided the Convention a summary report of the total per diem allowance per eligible delegate for each day. Noble, slip op. at 19. The district court found that this practice had continued ever since. Id. While we take no view on the propriety of per diem payments made to delegates other than Executive Council members which were approved by this summarized procedure, we do not find the Executive Council members' acceptance of payments in this way to be clearly contrary to NALC's constitution. Reading Article 11, § 6 as clearly and unambiguously prohibiting payments of per diem to Executive Council members during the Convention without their names and payment amounts having been read aloud to Convention delegates would flatly conflict with Article 13, § 2. The 1980 and 1992 versions of NALC's constitution explicitly state at Article 13, § 2 that [p]er diem shall be paid to each officer as the National Association, while in session, may direct. The 1992 NALC constitution lists as officers all 28 members of the Executive Council  and no one else. Thus, Article 13, § 2 appears to direct per diem payments to the very group Noble accuses of having violated § 501 by accepting them. We certainly cannot say that NALC's constitution unambiguously forbade them from receiving per diem if their names and addresses were not read aloud. Thus, NALC officials' interpretation of their constitution as authorizing their acceptance of per diem payments via this summarized approval procedure is owed deference unless shown unreasonable or in bad faith. In determining reasonableness, a district court may consider the union's consistent past practices, see Conley v. Parton, 116 L.R.R.M. (BNA) 3071, 3075-76 (N.D.Ind.1984). We agree with the district court that the Executive Council's reliance on past practice and a plain language reading of other provisions in NALC's constitution as authorizing per diem payments to Executive Council members without having read their names aloud to the Convention was reasonable and entitled to deference. We further find no merit to Noble's argument that Convention delegates were misled about the nature of payments or uninformed that the officers would receive full per diem payments. The total per diem was a set figure and Noble concedes that, even under the streamlined procedure followed through 1992, the Convention was informed of the total per diem amount determined by the Mileage and Per Diem Committee. Combining that information with a basic reading of NALC's constitution would alert delegates that Executive Council officers were receiving those sums, even if no names were read aloud to the Convention delegates. Thus, we cannot say that the district court erred by finding both the summarized procedure and the officers' acceptance of per diem payments during Convention meetings neither unreasonable nor in bad faith.