Opinion ID: 197361
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Addressing the Studio Audience.

Text: B. Addressing the Studio Audience. The Company contends that the Board engaged in piecemeal analysis and ignored overwhelming record evidence indicating that TDs responsibly direct studio technicians. After carefully examining the entire record, we conclude that substantial evidence supports the Board's determination that the three TDs are ordinary employees, not supervisors. The linchpin of this assessment is that, as the Board pointed out, the primary responsibilities of the TDs relate to safeguarding equipment, ensuring that the crew is positioned in 9 accordance with the script, performing actual production work, and documenting the events (or nonevents) incident to the production of particular programs. Although these duties carry responsibilities greater than those borne by studio technicians, they do not require the exercise of independent judgment in any legally meaningful sense. Certainly, superintending the maintenance and use of equipment is not commonly thought to be a supervisory function or to require managerial authority. See Maine Yankee, 624 F.2d at 361-62. Similarly, the mere fact that an employee gives other employees instructions from time to time does not in and of itself render him a supervisor for purposes of the Act. See Stop & Shop, 548 F.2d at 19. Rather, the portent of that fact depends on the relative significance of the instructions given. See id.; see also Goldies, 628 F.2d at 710. In this situation, the TDs do little more than implement the instructions contained in the program's script. Moreover, because each technician has his own assignment and performs repetitive tasks day after day, the crew members require minimal supervision. Viewed in the totality of the circumstances, the TDs' orders are both perfunctory and routine. Thus, the instructions, evaluated in context, do not fairly indicate that the instructors possess authority to exercise independent judgment in overseeing other employees. See NLRB v. Dickerson-Chapman, Inc., 964 F.2d 493, 496, 499-500 (5th Cir. 1992); Goldies, 628 F.2d at 710; see also Westinghouse Broad. Co., 216 NLRB 327, 329 (1975) (finding that television 10 directors did not responsibly direct employees where the directions they gave were routine technical commands made pursuant to preconceived production guidelines which ha[d] been approved by higher authorities). Although the fact that TDs are the highest-ranking persons at the station on certain occasions hints at supervisory status, that fact alone does not convert otherwise routine duties into supervisory tasks. See Fall River Sav. Bank v. NLRB, 649 F.2d 50, 54 (1st Cir. 1981). And, here, the additional duties performed by the TDs on those occasions are mundane. None of them necessitates supervisory authority for its due performance. The technical supervisor, not the TD, is responsible for work assignments and replacements; only when the TS is unavailable does the TD locate substitutes, and, even then, the TD must refer to a list of names prepared by the TS. This function irregular, mechanical, and devoid of independent judgment does not constitute true authority to assign work.2 See Northeast Utils., 35 F.3d at 625; Highland Superstores, Inc. v. NLRB, 927 F.2d 918, 923 (6th Cir. 1991). Finally, filing daily reports and attending the occasional meeting does not make a decisive difference in this situation. See, e.g., Stop & Shop, 548 F.2d at 20; NLRB v. Magnesium Casting Co., 427 F.2d 114, 117 (1st Cir.), aff'd, 401 2This conclusion is fortified by the fact that the department director and the TS are on call, and the Company provides the TDs with their home telephone numbers for use if an emergency arises. See North Shore Weeklies, Inc., 317 NLRB 1128, 1131 (1995); Ball Plastics Div., 228 NLRB 633, 634 (1977). 11 U.S. 137 (1970). The reports are merely informational; the TDs do not effectively recommend disciplinary action by completing the forms. Thus, even though the information conveyed in these reports sometimes may lead to the imposition of discipline, it is not the writers who make the call. Even on those few occasions when the TDs have submitted recommendations, their superiors have exercised independent judgment in deciding whether (and if so, what) disciplinary action is warranted. In these respects, then, the TDs are mere scriveners and acting as an amanuensis or otherwise fulfilling a purely reportorial function is not an indicium of supervisory status. See Highland Superstores, 927 F.2d at 922. The evidence as to meetings is also subject to conflicting inferences. To be sure, the TDs attended a few meetings for supervisors but many such meetings were held to which they were not invited. And when they attempted to arrange technicians' meetings, they were stymied unless they received the blessing of Rivera and Corps. We do not mean to imply that the evidence is one-sided or that the pivotal question is free from doubt. There are several evidentiary trails in the record, some leading toward one destination at which the Board arrived and some leading away from it. Some of the factors which we have discussed argue in varying degrees for supervisory status the TDs' hegemony at certain times, their pay level, the giving of instructions to others, occasionally passing out work assignments, filing reports, and attending meetings but many of them are double-edged. Just as 12 important, the Board considered the collective force of these factors and rejected the inference hawked by the Company in favor of a different, equally supported inference. On reflection, we cannot say that the Board's choice was arbitrary or capricious. In a last-ditch effort to save the show, the petitioner flips to another channel. It urges that Maine Yankee requires overturning the Board's decision here. We do not agree. In Maine Yankee, the Board decided that shift operating supervisors at a nuclear power plant were not statutory supervisors. We reversed. 624 F.2d at 366. Because the shift supervisors would have to answer for anything that went wrong with the plant's electrical output, management held them fully accountable and responsible for the employees' performance, and, thus, they possessed authority responsibly to direct other employees. See id. at 360-61; see also NLRB v. J.K. Elecs., Inc., 592 F.2d 5, 7 (1st Cir. 1979) (holding as supervisors group leaders who could lose their positions if employees in their group failed to meet production quotas). Here, however, the record contains no compelling evidence that a TD is held accountable for the adequate performance of the crew's technical work. This distinction makes a world of difference. See Northeast Utils., 35 F.3d at 625 (distinguishing Maine Yankee in excluding from supervisory status coordinators who were not responsible for the actions of other employees). The Company also claims that Maine Yankee bears upon the question of whether TDs perforce exercise independent 13 judgment because they cannot always reach the department director or the technical supervisor by telephone for emergency consultation. But Maine Yankee reflects a vastly different plot. In that case, the panel emphasized the complexity, variety, and dangerousness of operational duties at an atomic power plant, 624 F.2d at 361 & n.14, 363, and distinguished a shift supervisor there who had to initiate remedial measures quickly whether or not he could reach his superiors from a dispatcher who assigns employees and equipment according to a relatively simple preprogrammed plan developed by the employer, id. at 363. There is no evidence in the instant record of comparable complexity or dangerousness, nor is there evidence that a TD may have to make emergency decisions on hazardous or even intricate matters. Indeed, the only relevant proof relates to decisions such as whether to proceed with two cameras instead of three if a cameraman is missing. Under these circumstances, we cannot fault the Board's conclusion that the TDs act more as dispatchers, performing routine tasks and conveying boilerplate instructions, than as supervisors. And, moreover, the Board's conclusion is wholly consistent with the TDs' stated self-perception that they are crew leaders, no more. To conclude, there is a fine line between the upper strata of employees and the lowest rungs of the management ladder. We freely acknowledge that the Board, had it chosen to weight the TDs' responsibilities differently, could have reached the opposite result. The question is admittedly close, yet its 14 very closeness argues persuasively in favor of deference to the Board. It is particularly in the close cases that judges, who are generalists, should respect the specialized knowledge of the Board and accede to its factbound determinations as long as they are rooted in the record. See Universal Camera, 340 U.S. at 488. Put bluntly, courts must be careful not to substitute their judgments for the Board's where, on whole-record review, the evidence supports any of several views and the Board has chosen among them. See NLRB v. Auciello Iron Works, Inc., 980 F.2d 804, 808 (1st Cir. 1992); Stop & Shop, 548 F.2d at 20.