Opinion ID: 672300
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: The Authority's Refusal to Consider PTO's Duty-to-Bargain Objections

Text: 15 This case is fraught with confusion, generated in large measure by the Authority's approach to this dispute below, and compounded by its defense of that approach before this court. In the Authority's negotiability decision, it refused to consider the duty-to-bargain challenges presented by the Agency. See Negotiability Order, J.A. 408. The Authority simply held that the Union was entitled to a decision on whether a disputed provision is negotiable under the Statute even if additional issues exist, including whether an agency is obligated to bargain over certain proposals made by a union. Id. (citation omitted). Accordingly, the Authority decided that the Agency's duty-to-bargain objections would have to be resolved in other appropriate proceedings. Id. Neither the parties nor the court have the faintest idea what this decision means. This was highlighted at oral argument, to the consternation of all who listened, when Authority counsel stubbornly defended the Authority's refusal to consider the duty-to-bargain questions by arguing that the Authority's decision was conditional and insisting that the Authority did not have to explain what other proceeding would be appropriate. The problem is that neither Authority counsel nor the Authority itself has indicated on what the decision is conditioned. Because the Authority's decision is incomprehensible on these points, each party self-servingly interprets the present state of their bargaining agreement quite differently. 16 The upshot of the Authority's approach is that the Agency and the Union completely disagree over whether the new proposals are presently embodied in the bargaining agreement as ordered by the interest arbitrator. The Agency argues that the Authority's Negotiability Order is conditional in the sense that the Agency need not honor or implement Article 19 until the duty-to-bargain issues are resolved. PTO then goes on to declare that the challenged proposals are now effectively dead because a forum no longer exists to resolve its objections; i.e., an unfair labor practice charge against it for refusing to honor the proposals would be untimely, and it is not subject to a grievance proceeding because the proposals are not part of the contract. Conversely, the Union insists that those proposals that are negotiable are part of Article 19, and that the Agency is bound by their terms and subject to a grievance proceeding if it fails to implement the provisions. Rather than shedding light on what its own decision actually means, the Authority merely repeats that it is not obligated to resolve the issues and that such issues are for some still-unspecified time and place. The Authority's position in this case is utterly irrational and has exacerbated the already contentious nature of the parties' bargaining relationship. 17 Focusing on the combined effect of the Authority's holding that the interest arbitrator had jurisdiction to issue an award on all of the disputed proposals and its refusal to consider the duty-to-bargain issues, illuminates the irrationality of the Authority's approach. By finding that the arbitrator had jurisdiction to impose the entirety of Article 19 on the parties, the Authority must have assumed that the Agency was contractually bound by the terms of the performance appraisal proposals found to be negotiable. See Negotiability Order, J.A. 409 (Those provisions which we find are negotiable will be included in the parties' agreement.). At the same time, however, the Authority seems to recognize that the Agency may have had no duty to bargain over at least some of the proposals. How can the Agency, on the one hand, be contractually bound by proposals that, on the other hand, were either untimely raised by the Union or not properly before the interest arbitrator because they never had been the subject of negotiations between the parties? 18 If the Authority had simply decided the negotiability issues and declined to decide whether the impasse arbitrator had acted within his jurisdiction, we might be able to make sense of the decision. But the Authority did not so limit its decision, for it held that [t]hose provisions [found] negotiable will be included in the parties' agreement. Negotiability Order, J.A. 409 (emphasis added). The Agency is now stuck between the proverbial rock and a hard place: having lost before an interest arbitrator with respect to matters not within his jurisdiction and having lost before the Authority in part on the grounds that the arbitrator did have jurisdiction and that the disputed provisions are included in the parties' agreement, the Agency is now left with the Authority's incomprehensible suggestion that, to the extent that issues still exist, they should be resolved in some unidentified other appropriate proceedings. The Authority's purported resolution of this case is not only inane, it is patently unfair.