Opinion ID: 2827787
Heading Depth: 5
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Designating an Employee to a Place

Text: With respect to designating an employee to a place, the Acting Regional Director found that that TSSs did occasionally dispatch field employees to re-assigned locations . . . and to trouble locations. The Acting Regional Director, like the Board in Entergy Mississippi, then assumed without deciding that these sorts of directions to go to particular locations to do discrete tasks constitute assignments within the meaning of the statute.10 See Entergy Miss., 357 N.L.R.B. No. 178, at 7. For that reason, the Acting Regional Director proceeded to the second part of the supervisor test. He addressed whether NSTAR had shown that the 10 The Board had explained in Entergy Mississippi that electrical dispatchers did in a sense assign field employees to places, by telling field employees where to go [d]uring trouble outages. 357 N.L.R.B., No. 178, at 9. Entergy Mississippi did not resolve, however, whether that was assignment or ad hoc direction. The Board held instead that there was no independent judgment involved in any event -- as would be necessary for any assignment power to make the employees into supervisors -- because the dispatchers utilize a computer program that notifies them of trouble spot locations, and usually assign to trouble spots employees already assigned to that specific area. Id. at 7. - 20 - performance of such tasks -- assuming they amounted to a power to assign -- required the exercise of independent judgment. The Acting Regional Director took his definition of independent judgment from Oakwood Healthcare. There, the Board held that independent judgment meant that an individual must at minimum act, or effectively recommend action, free of the control of others and form an opinion or evaluation by discerning and comparing data. Oakwood Healthcare, 348 N.L.R.B. at 692-93. As a result, Oakwood Healthcare explained, judgment is not independent if it is dictated or controlled by detailed instructions, whether set forth in company policies or rules, the verbal instructions of a higher authority, or in the provisions of a collective bargaining agreement. Id. at 693. Likewise, [i]f there is only one obvious and self- evident choice . . . or if the assignment is made solely on the basis of equalizing workloads, then the assignment is routine or clerical in nature and does not implicate independent judgment, even if it is made free of the control of others and involves forming an opinion or evaluation by discerning and comparing data. Id.11 11 For the reasons we have already given, NSTAR supplies us with no reason not to defer to the Acting Regional Director's interpretation of the supervisor definition in general or of his reliance on Oakwood Healthcare's interpretation of it in particular, including with respect to the meaning of independent judgment. - 21 - We thus proceed to assess whether substantial evidence supports the Acting Regional Director's finding that NSTAR had not shown that this particular power to assign -- assuming it qualified as such -- involved the use of independent judgment as Oakwood Healthcare construed those words. The Acting Regional Director explained that NSTAR had not shown that any . . . judgments the TSSs made in routing field employees to outage locations were free of the control of others. Rather, the Acting Regional Director found that such judgments were controlled by detailed instructions. The TSSs, the Acting Regional Director concluded, must follow established call-out procedures in telling which field employees where to report. And after the first field employee is sent pursuant to those procedures, the first responder, a field employee, informs the supervisor or TSS if additional employees are needed, and if so, what type of employee is needed. The Acting Regional Director therefore concluded that the record showed that the TSSs' routing of field employees to an outage location is nothing more than a routine task, and did not involve independent judgment. NSTAR responds by pointing to certain pieces of evidence in the record that might suggest the opposite conclusion. But in doing so, NSTAR does not address the competing record evidence on which the Acting Regional Director relied. One worker familiar with TSS job duties, for example, explained that in deciding which - 22 - field employee to send to complete a task, [t]here's no discretion, you have one [field employee in a geographical area], he's going, that's it. Likewise, a TSS witness explained, a TSS is not really choosing [between workers]. I mean . . . it's pretty automatic. If the work is scheduled for the North you talk to [the field employee scheduled for the North]. If it's scheduled for the South you talk to [the field employee scheduled for the South]. This TSS witness further explained that this same, automatic process applies to unplanned work, which he called [t]rouble. And while the record shows that TSSs sometimes ask field employees to do tasks outside their assigned areas, the record also shows that this would happen only if the field employee assigned to the area where the task takes place was unavailable, in which case the TSSs would call the next closest field employee.12 We thus conclude that the record provides substantial evidence to support the Acting Regional Director's conclusion that NSTAR had failed to show that any assignments the TSSs made by designating an employee to a place required the exercise of 12 The Acting Regional Director explained that the record failed to show that the TSSs[] perform an analysis of the field employees' skill set and level of proficiency . . . when routing field employees to an outage location. In contrast, he explained, the Board in Oakwood Healthcare, in finding independent judgment, emphasized that charge nurses found to be supervisors analyzed the personality of the staff and patients and specific skills or abilities of the nursing staff in making assignments. See Oakwood Healthcare, 348 N.L.R.B. at 697. - 23 - independent judgment. See NLRB v. Hilliard Dev. Corp., 187 F.3d 133, 140 (1st Cir. 1999) ([T]he possibility of drawing two inconsistent conclusions from the evidence does not prevent an administrative agency's finding from being supported by substantial evidence. (quoting Am. Textile Mfrs. Inst. v. Donovan, 452 U.S. 490, 523 (1981))). And so we affirm this finding.13 13 The Acting Regional Director did find that in multiple outage situations the TSSs prioritize trouble cases, and based upon the status of a case, can route field employees from one trouble case to another trouble case. In prioritizing such cases, the TSSs consider such things as the number of customers affected, the size of the customer, and the weather. But the Acting Regional Director then explained that NSTAR had not shown that such determinations were free from the control of others rather than controlled by detailed instructions. The Acting Regional Director thus found that any assignments that resulted from these prioritization decisions (and the designation to places that they entailed) did not require the use of independent judgment. It is not immediately clear to us how judgment of the type described by the Acting Regional Director's finding regarding prioritization of trouble spots could be circumscribed by detailed instructions, as the Acting Regional Director found it was. But NSTAR's brief to us makes no argument based on the Acting Regional Director's finding concerning prioritization discretion during multiple trouble cases. In fact, NSTAR's argument as to why the Acting Regional Director should have concluded that TSSs assign field employees based on their designating them to places does not mention trouble cases or prioritization discretion at all. And our own review of the record has turned up little evidence of any sort on whether TSSs made prioritization decisions in the context of multiple trouble cases, let alone how they went about making them when such issues arose. In the absence of a developed argument from NSTAR contending that this finding by the Acting Regional Director demonstrates that the - 24 -