Opinion ID: 760360
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Racial Appeals During Election Campaign

Text: 23 FSA objected after the election that [t]he union and its supporters and agents conducted a campaign and engaged in tactics and conduct designed to pit Latino workers against African-American and other non-Latino workers, thereby basing their campaign on racial and ethnic prejudice and discrimination, and also that [b]y ... appeals to racial and ethnic prejudice, the union unlawfully coerced, intimidated and interfered with the rights of eligible voters, and destroyed the laboratory conditions necessary for a valid election. J.A. at 44 (letter to NLRB, January 15, 1997). The hearing officer rejected this objection, we think reasonably. 24 We begin with the law that governs the use of race-based messages in union campaigns. The principle that the party challenging the election bears the burden of proving its invalidity gives way if the party that prevailed in the election used racial propaganda in an irrelevant and inflammatory manner. If the prevailing party inflamed racial prejudice to garner pro- or anti-union support, then it must prove that its race-laden statements were truthful and germane to the unionization effort. The Board has articulated the perimeters of racially charged but permissible campaign statements and messages: 25 ... [A] relevant campaign statement is [not] to be condemned because it may have racial overtones.... We would be less than realistic if we did not recognize that such statements, even when moderate and truthful, do in fact cater to racial prejudice. Yet we believe that they must be tolerated because they are true and because they pertain to a subject concerning which employees are entitled to have knowledge.... 26 So long, therefore, as a party limits itself to truthfully setting forth another party's position on matters of racial interest and does not deliberately seek to overstress and exacerbate racial feelings by irrelevant, inflammatory appeals, we shall not set aside an election on this ground. However, the burden will be on the party making use of a racial message to establish that it was truthful and germane, and where there is doubt as to whether the total conduct of such party is within the described bounds, the doubt will be resolved against him. 27 Sewell Mfg. Co., 138 N.L.R.B. 66, 71-72, 1962 WL 16079 (1962) (footnote omitted) (emphasis in original). 28 Applying Sewell, we look first to whether the Union deliberately drove a wedge between African-American and Latina co-workers by racial baiting--namely, by assailing the center's alleged language policy in a way that was inflammatory and irrelevant to the campaign and by failing to ensure the inclusion of African-Americans during the membership drive. 6 Our sister circuits have approached this task by examining the tenor and relevance of the union's race-based message as well as the degree to which the message formed the core of the unionization drive. See, e.g., M&M Supermarkets, Inc. v. NLRB, 818 F.2d 1567 (11th Cir.1987); NLRB v. Utell Int'l, Inc., 750 F.2d 177 (2d Cir.1984); NLRB v. Silverman's Men's Wear, Inc., 656 F.2d 53 (3d Cir.1981); Peerless of America, Inc. v. NLRB, 576 F.2d 119 (7th Cir.1978); NLRB v. Bancroft Mfg. Co., 516 F.2d 436 (5th Cir.1975). The more outrageous and inflammatory the statement, the less important the question whether it formed the core of the campaign, and the more difficult it becomes for its sponsor to prove its relevance and truth. For example, in Silverman's Men's Wear, the Third Circuit held that the NLRB erred in not holding a hearing based on evidence proffered by the employer that a union official called a company official a stingy Jew in front of 20 employees shortly before the election. 656 F.2d at 57-58. Although the statement stood alone and did not comprise a core campaign issue, the court found it to be so inflammatory that the Union clearly could not have met its burden of proving it was actually relevant. Id. at 58; see also M&M Supermarkets, 818 F.2d at 1573-74 (one employee's reference to employers as those damned Jews at a single meeting enough to invalidate election); cf. Utell Int'l, 750 F.2d at 179 (the Sewell test for truth and relevancy ... is applicable only to inflammatory racial appeals). 7 29 It is permissible for a union to promulgate a message that is wholly relevant and accurate, even though it implicates race. A union's claim that management discriminated on the basis of race, sex and national origin [is] not an inflammatory racial appeal. State Bank of India, 808 F.2d at 542; cf. Utell Int'l, 750 F.2d at 178-79. The hearing officer in this case reasonably concluded that the Union's and employees' statements and actions regarding the language issue amounted to no more than a claim of discrimination. Lourdes Perez' notation on the June 26 meeting form that Latina employees had been forbidden from speaking Spanish, the subsequent skirmishes over language issues between Latina employees and their supervisors, Latina employees' complaints to the news media that their supervisors harangued them to speak English, and the similar comments made during the radio interview do not appear to be empty claims aimed at provoking racial hatred. We reach this conclusion without deciding whether these acts were attributable to the Union. See NLRB v. Herbert Halperin Distributing Corp., 826 F.2d 287, 291 (4th Cir.1987) (question is whether the amount of association between the union and the [employees] is significant enough to justify charging the union with the conduct) (quotation omitted). By so doing, we subject the Union to a standard more stringent than that other courts have required when examining the actions of third parties: Where the Union sponsored the race-based message, the election must be set aside if the message was inflammatory and inspired an atmosphere of fear and coercion. Cf. id. at 290 (election set aside because of third-party conduct only if election was held in a general atmosphere of confusion, violence, and threats of violence...) (citation omitted). Even assuming arguendo that the Union was responsible for the turmoil over the alleged existence of a language policy, we are unable to identify any statements or actions it made that were so inflammatory and irrelevant that the Board's contrary conclusion must be overturned. The comments reported in the San Francisco Examiner article and the statements made in the radio interview appear to us, as to the Board, to be reasonably accurate descriptions of the situation as Garcia and the Latina employees perceived it to be and not calculated to spark racial prejudice. 8 Written records--namely, from the June 5 staff meeting in Room 2--and the testimony of Vivian Storey as to her encounters with Latina employees may tend to support FSA's contention that there was no official English-only policy. However, the hearing officer found that employees' testimony to the contrary was credible, and it is not necessary to determine whether there actually existed an established English-only policy; the relevant point is that the Board could reasonably find, in this conflicted record, that the Latina employees' allegations that one existed were not reckless, capricious, or otherwise emblematic of an intent to invoke racial hatred. The subsequent conflict over the use of Spanish in the presence of non-Spanish speaking employees, the complaints by African-American workers about feeling excluded among Spanish speakers, and the racial bifurcation of the Thanksgiving dinner illustrate the racial tension at FSA but do not necessarily lead to the conclusion that the Union was igniting prejudice. The hearing officer did not credit Jones' testimony that the words black monkey were actually uttered, J.A. at 67, and there is no reason in the record for us to disturb this finding. See E.N. Bisso & Son, 84 F.3d at 1444-45 (hearing officer is uniquely well-placed to draw conclusions about credibility) (citation and quotation omitted). 30 We stress that we do not endorse what appears from most accounts to have been a palpable disinterest by the Union in non-Latino workers and the resulting de facto segregation of employees during the organizing drive. See Sumter Plywood, 535 F.2d at 926 (This concentration on voters of one race, to the relative exclusion of voters of the other, is disturbing and is not to be condoned). Yet even considering this lamentable behavior towards African-American workers, we nonetheless agree with the Board that there was nothing in this tendentious campaign that made impossible a sober, informed exercise of the franchise. Sewell Mfg., 138 N.L.R.B. at 71. 31