Opinion ID: 360524
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: issues

Text: 6 Oshman's petition raises the following issues: 7 1.) Should the Regional Director have ordered a hearing on Oshman's objections relating to Teamster threats of physical violence? 8 2.) Should the Regional Director have ordered a hearing to investigate Oshman's charges that the Teamsters lied to its employees about wage rates? 9 3.) Should the Regional Director have held a hearing to determine how many employees received a letter in which a Teamster organizer falsely stated that the Board ordered a new election because of Oshman's lies and false promises?Our role in considering this case is a limited one. Primary authority to conduct elections has been vested by Congress in the Board, which has a wide degree of discretion in these matters. NLRB v. A. J. Tower Co., 1946, 329 U.S. 324, 67 S.Ct. 324, 91 L.Ed. 323. Therefore, our review is circumscribed, and Oshman's carries a heavy burden in charging that . . . coercion prevented a fair election NLRB v. Sauk Valley Mfg. Co., Inc., 9 Cir., 1973, 486 F.2d 1127, 1130, quoting Shoreline Enterprises of America, Inc. v. NLRB, 5 Cir., 1959, 262 F.2d 933, 942. See also, Natter Mfg. Corp. v. NLRB, 9 Cir., 1978, 580 F.2d 948, 951; NLRB v. Adrian Belt Co., 9 Cir., 1978, 578 F.2d 1304, 1311; International Tel. & Tel. Corp. v. NLRB, 9 Cir., 1961, 294 F.2d 393, 395. 10 Cases in which Board conducted elections are attacked come to the Board and the courts in substantial numbers. As a result, the Board has developed a considerable body of rules defining various types of conduct that will, or will not, require that an election be set aside. A recent study, however, casts considerable doubt on the validity of the Board's approach to this problem. Getman, J.G., S.B. Goldberg and J.B. Herman, Union Representation Elections: Law and Reality, 1976, Russell Sage Foundation, N.Y. The study first appeared in 27 Stan.L.Rev. 1465 (1975) and 28 Stan.L.Rev. 263 (1976). The study was extensive, and appears to have been carefully done. The principal conclusion is startling: 11 The assumptions on which the Board regulates campaigning are not supported by the data. Contrary to the Board's assumption, the campaign plays a limited role in the employees' decision to vote for or against union representation. Similarly inaccurate is the assumption that certain types of campaigning are likely to have a coercive impact. Voting behavior in elections involving campaign tactics believed to be coercive is not significantly different from voting behavior in campaigns that conform to the Board's standard of laboratory conditions. 12 Many of the Board's rules governing campaign tactics can be eliminated. Those campaign regulations that are preserved should not require the Board to make impact judgments. The data indicate that the Board has no basis on which to find that some campaign practices have a coercive impact on employees generally or on particular groups of employees. Nor can the Board determine the impact of particular campaign tactics in individual cases. Its efforts to do so on the basis of intuition or experience of Board members have been wholly unsuccessful. Board members disagree with one another as to impact; the courts disagree with the Board; and the data show no relationship between Board findings and employee perceptions of coercive behavior. 13 Id. at 146-47. 14 We recommend that the Board cease regulating speech and, for election purposes, nearly all conduct. 15 Id. at 159. 16 In Shopping Kart Food Market, Inc., 1977, 228 NLRB 1311, the Board has announced that it will no longer probe into the truth or falsity of the parties' campaign statements, thus accepting, in part, the conclusions of the study. 17 It is tempting to us to seize upon the study and go farther than the Board did in Shopping Kart, holding that we will no longer sustain orders setting aside elections, or set aside orders sustaining them, in cases of threats as well as in cases of claimed misrepresentations in election campaigns. However, we resist the temptation because it is the Board, not the courts, that is presumed to be expert in this field.