Opinion ID: 679499
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: The Retirement Thrift Plan

Text: 64 At the time of the unionization drive, the company's retirement package included a pension plan and a Retirement Thrift Plan (RTP). The Master Agreement, by contrast, provided a pension plan only. Sometime in April 1990, Bugnitz sent a memo to all Vineland employees answering employee questions about the relation between the Master Agreement and the RTP. See J.A. 456. In response to an inquiry about whether employees would keep all benefits they already had if they chose the union and came under the Agreement, the memo declared: 65 Absolutely not. If the union wins the election, you would get exactly what is in the agreement, no more! If you have something that is not in the agreement, YOU LOSE IT. If you now have something that is better than the agreement, it gets reduced to what is in the agreement. 66 That's exactly what happened at Lancaster in 1986 when the employees voted in the Steelworkers. The Lancaster employees LOST the right to participate in the Company's Retirement Thrift Plan.... 67 J.A. 456. In addition, on April 5, Lynne Krueger, Crown's employee relations manager from its Rochelle Park, New Jersey, office, conducted a meeting, together with Bugnitz, in which she presented a slide show and a document which both concluded with the statement that if the union won the election, [f]uture participation [in the RTP] would be discontinued immediately. J.A. 455. 68 The ALJ characterized these assertions as an illegal threat, made without an adequate basis in fact. He regarded the Master Agreement as unambiguously providing for continuation of the Vineland RTP, so that he felt no need to consider the evidence as to the parties' actual interpretation of the Master Agreement. Thus he completely ignored the uncontroverted fact that, on the three prior occasions when the Agreement had been applied to a newly unionized Crown plant with a preexisting RTP, the benefit had been dropped without a word of protest from the Steelworkers. J.A. 137-39. 69 The pertinent provisions of the Master Agreement read as follows: 70 4.2. Presently effective local customs or practices, written or oral, which are not specifically covered by provisions of this Agreement and which are not in conflict with its provisions shall remain in effect during the term of this Agreement. 71 4.3. Presently effective local customs or practices, written or oral, which provide benefits in excess of the specific benefits provided for through the provisions of this Agreement shall be continued for the term of this Agreement unless eliminated by mutual agreement. 72 J.A. 327. 73 All parties agree that we read the Agreement without any particular deference to the Board's view of it, Wilson & Sons Heating and Plumbing, Inc. v. NLRB, 971 F.2d 758, 760 (D.C.Cir.1992); see also Litton Financial Printing v. NLRB, 501 U.S. 190, 202-03, 111 S.Ct. 2215, 2223-24, 115 L.Ed.2d 177 (1991), here reflected solely in the ALJ's findings. 74 The ALJ read Sec. 4.2 as providing for the continuation of local customs and practices not in the Master Agreement nor in conflict with it, and Sec. 4.3 as ensuring the continuance of excess specific benefits. J.A. 538. In other words, Secs. 4.2 and 4.3, taken together, imply (in his view) that all preexisting benefits not inconsistent with the terms and conditions of the Master Agreement are retained, including those in excess of specific benefits provided by it. The only preexisting benefits not retained are those covered by the Master Agreement, but that are less generous. If intended, such a meaning could surely have been expressed more directly. 75 Crown offers an alternative reading that stresses Sec. 4.3's explicit reference to benefits, which is missing from Sec. 4.2. Crown reads Sec. 4.3 as the exclusive provision on benefits, and argues that it continues them if, but only if, they (1) match specific benefits provided in the Master Agreement, and (2) are more generous. Stingier benefits, or ones not tracking those of the Master Agreement, are by implication dropped. Thus the RTP would end, since it does not track any benefit of the Master Agreement. 76 Unless Crown's view is unambiguously wrong--and, given the document's apparent waste of words in the ALJ's view, Crown's seems at least as strong a contender--the evidence of the parties' actual interpretation in the past is highly relevant. See, e.g., United Mine Workers v. Bituminous Coal Operators' Ass'n, 898 F.2d 177, 181 (D.C.Cir.1990). Here, in each of the three known cases where a plant with an RTP was brought under the Master Agreement, Crown had dropped the RTP without protest from the union. 77 As the terms of the contract are ambiguous, and the evidence of past practice supports Crown's reading as clearly as such evidence can, the company's prediction of termination was a reasonable one based on available facts, Gissel, 395 U.S. at 618, 89 S.Ct. at 1942, and cannot be the basis of an unfair labor practice.