Opinion ID: 510613
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Do Other Precedents Guide?

Text: 129 Petitioners, claiming that every court to have addressed the issue has said that labor factors should be taken into account by the Commission, direct our attention to PMA; Volkswagenwerk, 390 U.S. at 283-91, 88 S.Ct. at 941-45 (Harlan, J., concurring); and New York Shipping Ass'n v. FMC, 495 F.2d 1215, 1222 (2d Cir.1974). The first-cited decision endorsed the Commission's practice of exempting certain collective bargaining agreements from the filing requirement of Section 15, in deference to national labor policy; it did not consider whether the Commission is required to analyze non-exempt agreements, or carrier practices implementing them, in any way different than it would other filings under section 15. In Volkswagenwerk, the Court reversed the Commission's decision to exempt from filing under section 15 an agreement among carriers to impose a per-ton charge upon shippers in order to fund an obligation, agreed to in collective bargaining, to mitigate the impact upon employees of technological unemployment. In his separate opinion, Justice Harlan allowed that the ensuing Commission review must be circumscribed by the existence of labor problems that it is not equipped to resolve. Volkswagenwerk, 390 U.S. at 287, 88 S.Ct. at 943. Far from indicating that the FMC should specifically consider the labor context underlying a filing, however, Justice Harlan was clear that [t]he real difficulty in this case is ... to define the Commission's jurisdiction in such a way that ... the Commission will not improperly be brought into labor matters where it does not belong. Id. at 286, 88 S.Ct. at 943. 130 As for New York Shipping Ass'n, the dictum there that labor interests demand the Commission's continuing attention throughout the process of investigating the status of the agreement under [sections] 16 and 17, and the court's attempt to identify each portion of the agreement as having relatively more impact on the collective bargaining process and relatively less on competitive conditions in the industry, or vice versa, so that some would be subject to and some exempt from the requirements of the shipping laws, are not helpful either to petitioners or to this court. That was a section 15 case of pre-implementation review of a collective bargaining agreement, a procedure dropped from the law by the 1984 Act because of the problems it created for collective bargaining. 131 In sum, there is no guiding, much less binding, precedent on the point before us. 132