Opinion ID: 6933483
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: The Nature and Purposes of Multiem-ployer Bargaining

Text: Multiemployer bargaining is a very common practice throughout the United States and literally involves millions of employees and thousands of employers. See Charles D. Bonanno Linen Serv., Inc. v. NLRB, 454 U.S. 404, 410 n. 4, 102 S.Ct. 720, 724 n. 4, 70 L.Ed.2d 656 (1982). The practice is probably as old as unionism itself. See Clarence E. Bennett, Employers’ Associations in the United States: A Study of Typical Associations 21 (1921) (employer associations can be traced to middle-ages). It is a process by which employers band together to act as a single entity in bargaining with a common union or unions. Typically, the employers are competitors in the products and services they provide to buyers. Quite often, they are <also horizontal competitors for labor. For example, local printing firms that compete with each other to obtain printing jobs and to obtain labor may bargain jointly with a union of printers. One important purpose of such bargaining is to strengthen the employers’ hand by preventing a union from whipsawing employers by shutting them down one-by-one, a tactic that forces each employer to give in to the union’s most extreme demand. See Bonanno Linen, 454 U.S. at 409-10 & n. 3, 102 S.Ct. at 723-24 & n. 3. Multiemployer bargaining thus allows employers to form a common front as to terms and conditions to be offered to a union and to confront the union with a simultaneous shutdown of all the employers should negotiations fail and the parties resort to economic force. Such bargaining also eliminates competitive disadvantages resulting from differing CBA terms for different employers. Id. at 409 n. 3, 102 S.Ct. at 723 n. 3. Finally, it makes available group benefit programs that may be unavailable to individual employers and reduces negotiating costs by eliminating multiple negotiations. Id In the sports industry, multiemployer bargaining exists not only for the reasons stated above but also because some terms and conditions of employment must be the same for all teams in a sports league. Unlike the industrial context in which many work rules can differ from employer to employer — even though a roughly common bottom line is desirable — sports leagues need many common rules. Number of games, length of season, playoff structures, and roster size and composition, for example, are just a few of the many kinds of league rules that are typically bargained over by sports leagues and unions of players. Appellants’ claim is that employers may not agree upon common terms and conditions of employment to be negotiated in a new CBA, bargain hard over those terms, ultimately insist upon them, and even obtain them by resorting to economic force. Appellants thus claim that the most routine practices of multiemployer bargaining, if not its very raison d’etre, are per se unlawful. It is the essence of multiemployer bargaining that employers jointly establish and maintain a unified front in dealing with a common union. That goal requires that employers be allowed to meet and agree upon the terms and conditions of employment to be pursued as a unit and to act as though they were a single employer. The Players’ claim is thus based on the proposition that the major purposes of, and the means employed by, multiemployer organizations are illegal.