Opinion ID: 692266
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: facts

Text: 3 Underlying this case is a dispute over whether Brown & Sharpe engaged in bad-faith bargaining with the Union during prolonged contract negotiations preceding a strike that began on October 18, 1981. At the time of these negotiations, the Union represented about 1600 workers at Brown & Sharpe's facility in Kingstown, R.I. Bargaining between the parties began on September 4, 1981, but failed to yield agreement on two key issues: (1) the prevailing practice of job preference or machine seniority, under which employees could exercise their seniority to obtain an assignment to a specific job or machine in their group; and (2) mandatory transfers, a provision in the previous collective bargaining agreement prohibiting the Company from transferring employees without their consent. 4 After the employees went on strike on October 18, the Union filed timely unfair labor practice charges on November 5, 1981, and on March 18, 1982, alleging that Brown & Sharpe had failed to bargain in good faith in violation of sections 8(a)(1) and 8(a)(5) of the NLRA, 29 U.S.C. Secs. 158(a)(1), 158(a)(5) (1988). The General Counsel subsequently dismissed all charges. On July 30, 1982, after final dismissal of the charges, the Union learned that David Waterman, the former Director of Industrial Relations at Brown & Sharpe, had sued the Company for wrongful discharge, claiming that he had been fired for refusing to commit unfair labor practices. Relying mainly on Waterman's allegations, the Union filed another charge on September 29, 1982, alleging that the Company had fired Waterman for refusing to pursue unlawful surface bargaining, thus showing that the Company had never intended to bargain in good faith with the Union. 5 During investigation of the Union's charge concerning Waterman, the General Counsel learned of position papers that had been prepared for the Company's steering committee, a group that was created before contract negotiations began to assist in the formulation of the Company's bargaining strategy. The discovered position papers, as well as the minutes of steering committee meetings, revealed the thinking of certain Company officials with respect to potential contract proposals, including proposals relating to the two issues on which the parties had failed to reach agreement during negotiations. The papers and minutes allegedly bolstered the Union's surface bargaining theory by showing that the Company viewed the job preference and mandatory transfer issues as less critical to management than the Company had represented to the Union during negotiations, during which it stated that its proposals in those areas were absolutes (i.e., proposals without which the Company would not agree to any new contract). Based on these newly discovered documents, the General Counsel, on September 27, 1983, reinstated the Union's previously dismissed unfair labor practice charges. On December 7, 1983, the General Counsel issued a complaint that included the allegations based on the reinstated charges. 6 B. The Board's Decision in Brown & Sharpe I and This Court's Decision in District Lodge 64 7 When hearings began in 1984, Brown & Sharpe, in addition to denying the surface bargaining charge, moved to dismiss the portion of the complaint containing the reinstated charges on the ground that they had not been reinstated until after expiration of the section 10(b) limitations period. Section 10(b) requires parties to file an unfair labor practice charge with the Board within six months of the occurrence of the alleged violation. 1 The Administrative Law Judge (ALJ) initially ruled that he would reserve judgment on the motion until after a full evidentiary hearing on the merits. While the Company's special appeal from that ruling was pending, the Board issued its decision in Ducane, which held that a dismissed charge may not be reinstated [by the General Counsel] outside the 6-month limitations period of Section 10(b) absent special circumstances in which a respondent fraudulently conceals the operative facts underlying the alleged violation. 273 N.L.R.B. at 1390. As a result, the Board remanded the case to the ALJ for reconsideration in light of Ducane and ordered the General Counsel and the Union to show cause why the Company's motion to dismiss should not be granted. 8 In April 1986, the ALJ held that Ducane required dismissal of the surface bargaining charges because reinstatement had occurred long after the running of section 10(b)'s six-month period. The ALJ determined that, under Ducane, the limitations period could not be tolled based simply on the belated discovery of new evidence revealing that a respondent's explanation for its allegedly unlawful activity might have been untrue; rather, the Board required a respondent to have taken some affirmative act to fraudulently conceal operative facts. The ALJ then concluded that there was no evidence of such concealment by the Company, because the General Counsel had never requested the steering committee documents during the initial investigation of the case. See Brown & Sharpe Mfg. Co., 299 N.L.R.B. 586, 593-96 (1990) (Brown & Sharpe I ) (reprinting ALJ decision). 9 The Board affirmed, but found it unnecessary to determine whether the Company's failure to produce the committee documents during the General Counsel's initial investigation constituted fraudulent concealment. Id. at 590 n. 5. Instead, the Board found that, whether or not fraudulently concealed, the evidence did not constitute operative facts because, even viewing the evidence in a light most favorable to the General Counsel's position, it does not support a finding that the [Company] advanced proposals as genuine absolutes when it actually did not consider the proposals to be important to its operations. Id. at 587. Thus, the Board concluded that the committee documents do[ ] not sufficiently support the charge of [surface bargaining] so as to warrant extending the [section] 10(b) limitations period. Id. at 586. 10 On the Union's petition for review, this court upheld the Board's Ducane rule as well as the Board's authority to apply the rule retroactively to this case. District Lodge 64, 949 F.2d at 444-49. We concluded, however, that the Board had not sufficiently explained its operative facts standard so as to give adequate guidance concerning just how significant the [allegedly concealed] facts must be to trigger the Ducane fraudulent concealment exception. Id. at 449. We explained: 11 In considering federal statutes of limitations, we have said that deliberate concealment of material facts tolls the statute until the plaintiff discovers or with due diligence should have discovered the basis of the lawsuit. Fitzgerald v. Seamans, 553 F.2d 220, 228 (D.C.Cir.1977) (emphasis added). Of course the Board may wish to use another standard, and may well be free to do so. But it does not explicitly embrace any standard, and we find it hard to relate the Board's implicit standard to the facts. 12 Id. We further stated that, as a summary judgment or failure-to-state-a-claim ruling, the Board's decision appeared deficient because the Board d[id] not seem to view the evidence in the light most favorable to the (hypothetical) non-moving party (the Union) and because the Board (without any apparent support) seemed to dismiss inferences that might have been significant. Id. at 450. Accordingly, we remanded the case to the Board for resolution of the fraudulent concealment issue. Id. 13 C. The Board's Decision in Brown & Sharpe II 14 On remand, the Board adopted this court's standard for determining whether fraudulently concealed evidence warrants the tolling of a limitations period--namely, whether the concealed evidence constitutes material facts. Brown & Sharpe II, 312 N.L.R.B. at 444 (quoting Fitzgerald, 553 F.2d at 228). The Board then explained its understanding of the term material: 15 [C]oncealed evidence is material if it would make a critical difference between establishing a violation and not doing so. Thus, if the absence of that evidence results in the dismissal or withdrawal of the charge, the subsequent discovery of that evidence will permit the resurrection of the charge, provided that the other two elements [of fraudulent concealment] are present.... Id. at 445. 2 16 In applying this standard, the Board found that the committee documents, considered as a whole, although relevant to the charge of surface bargaining, ... do not make a critical difference in establishing a violation ... [and] therefore do not constitute material facts. Id. at 446. Because it concluded that the newly discovered evidence did not constitute material facts, the Board refused to reach the issue of whether the Company had fraudulently concealed the committee documents. Accordingly, the Board reaffirmed its earlier dismissal of the pertinent allegations of surface bargaining as being time-barred under section 10(b). The Union now petitions for review once again.