Opinion ID: 377887
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: company discretion in firing its employees

Text: 9 The Company points to Article 13, Section 1, of the collective bargaining agreement between the parties, the Management Rights Clause. It says, in relevant part, (t)he right to . . . suspend or discharge employees for just cause . . . is vested exclusively in this Company, subject to the terms of this Agreement. The Company concedes that the arbitrator could have refused to uphold Heller's dismissal if he had found that the Company acted without just cause, but it argues that because the arbitrator found Heller's conduct insubordinate and because he held that disciplining him was justified, the choice of whether to fire him or merely suspend him was entirely the Company's under the terms of Article 13, Section 1. In other words, the Company argues that under the collective bargaining agreement there is only one kind of just cause, and once just cause exists, the Company can either suspend or fire the employee as it pleases. 10 The arbitrator, however, interpreted this part of the collective bargaining agreement differently. Implicitly, the arbitrator determined that under the contract there might be just cause to suspend, when there was not just cause to fire. That the Company has the discretion to do the one in a particular case does not mean that it has discretion to do the other. Under the facts of this case, the arbitrator found that although Heller's conduct was sufficiently bad that under the agreement the Company could suspend him, the conduct was not so outrageous that it could dismiss him. 11 The situation we face is not like the one confronting the Tenth Circuit in Mistletoe Express Service v. Motor Expressmen's Union, 566 F.2d 692 (10th Cir. 1977), cited by the Company. In that case, the collective bargaining agreement explicitly stated that a particular form of misconduct (failure to turn in funds within 24 hours of their receipt) justified discharge of an employee. Once he found that the employee had committed this form of misconduct, the arbitrator was obliged to conclude that just cause for dismissal existed. By contrast, the agreement in this case does not expressly define Heller's misconduct as misconduct that constitutes just cause for firing. 12 The decisive point on this issue is that the labor agreement of the parties charges the arbitrator and not this Court with interpreting the collective bargaining agreement. Article 16, Section 2. To be sure, the arbitrator cannot substitute his or her discretion for the discretion of the Company, but the arbitrator does have the power to determine when a matter is subject to Company discretion. When two plausible interpretations of a clause of a collective bargaining agreement exist, an arbitrator's choice of one or the other ought to be honored. As the Supreme Court said in United Steelworkers v. Enterprise Wheel & Car Corp., 363 U.S. 593, 599, 80 S.Ct. 1358, 1362, 4 L.Ed.2d 1424 (1960), the question of interpretation of the collective bargaining agreement is a question for the arbitrator. It is the arbitrator's construction which was bargained for; and so far as the arbitrator's decision concerns the construction of the contract, the courts have no business overruling him because their interpretation of the contract is different from his. See Teamsters Local No. 878 v. Coca-Cola Bottling Co., 613 F.2d 716 (8th Cir. 1980).