Opinion ID: 695495
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: The February 2 Hiring Process

Text: 4 On the evening of February 1, Southwest held a meeting attended by company President Dan Regals, Personnel Director George Tamez, the officials in charge of the specialized departments--bakery, produce, and meat--and all the individual store managers. Southwest instructed the store managers to open their stores on February 2 in order to accept applications for all departments and to accept all applications all day long. Transcript (Tr.) 423. New employees would be selected that evening from among those who applied that day. In designing the job application process, Southwest expected that its managers--who were holdovers from the pre-sale company--would look for employees with whom they had prior good experiences, although it stoutly denies any preference for incumbent employees. While local media reported that the new owners of the Handy Andy stores were accepting job applications, they did not state when or where. Nor did Southwest make any effort to publicize that information. 5 Carl Schroat was in charge of hiring the meat department employees. According to Schroat, he was not authorized to hire any applicant who had not submitted an application on February 2, nor was he authorized to contact any employees to notify them of the deadline or request them to submit applications. Schroat testified that he received between 100 and 150 applications for meat department jobs from individual store managers on the evening of February 2, and that he selected the 77 incumbent employees from among those applications. He further maintained that none of these employees was granted any special notice of the application process beyond that of the general public. The record contains no direct evidence supporting or refuting that contention. 6 In selecting new hires, Schroat said he identified the best people, in the applications, best productive people, and preferred those that I had already known and that had been previously employed by us. Tr. 426-27. Schroat never said outright, however, that he preferred incumbent employees over strikers. To the contrary, Schroat maintained that he was familiar with the work of all the former strikers and, although some of them met his criteria, he did not consider them solely because they had not filed applications. 1 7 In contrast to the meat department hiring process, individual store managers were responsible for filling the grocery department positions; they were authorized both to notify incumbent employees personally of the application process and to rehire incumbents on February 2 even if they did not formally apply. The store managers were allowed simply to inform employees to come into work on February 3 and fill out a job application at that time. Bob Simmons, one of the store managers, rehired forty of his fifty incumbent employees, even though he obtained no applications from ten of the forty on February 2. He notified the ten on the evening of February 2 that they were rehired and told them to fill out applications upon reporting to work the following day. Simmons further testified that none of the four meat department employees who had worked in his store under Handy Andy submitted applications to him on February 2, 2 but that he found he had a staff of four the following day, two from his prior store staff, two from other stores. Simmons did not know how these employees had been hired.