Opinion ID: 308203
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Board Procedures as a Denial of a Fair Hearing.

Text: 15 In its briefs and argument to this court, the company unleashes a broad based attack on the procedures followed in this case. It alleges, in substance, that the Board's goal was to inflict a monetary penalty upon respondents in as high an amount as obtainable. Specifically, the company refers to the Board's refusal to follow the usual procedures of collecting statements from the claimants and making them available to the company for impeachment purposes. As support for the charge of unfairness, the company points to the fact that the ultimate award in the second back-pay order was almost unchanged from the back-pay specification originally prepared by the Regional Director. Since the specification contains, in effect, the gross claims, this indicates that the company's defense to the second back-pay order was, by and large, totally impotent. 7 16 We begin by noting that it is not the proper role of this court to establish Board investigative or discovery procedures. Absent a showing of unfairness, we are not at liberty to pass legal judgment on their processes. See N. L. R. B. v. Vapor Blast Mfg. Co., 7 Cir. 1961, 287 F.2d 402, 407. If, on occasion in the past, the Board has chosen to collect certain information and provide various items from its records to employers, that is its prerogative and it might well be the better practice in many cases. Where the Board, however, chooses to forego collection of the formal statements and to resist production on grounds of certain, judicially approved privileges, as it did here, we cannot condemn the practice simply because the Board has used different procedures in the past. The Board's procedures are not that strait-jacketed. 17 In Brown v. Thompson, 5 Cir. 1970, 430 F.2d 1214, this court was faced with the contention of a wrongful death claimant that the government, by refusing to produce a police report involving the investigation of the deceased's death, had made it impossible for plaintiff to succeed. Upholding the district court's refusal to require disclosure, we said: 18 Government documents are the outstanding example of matter which is privileged and which is not subject to disclosure. . . . Whether there should be a disclosure is within the discretion of the trial court and, like other discretionary matters, the determination of the court should be made by a balancing of interests. The exercise of discretion, like other matters of discretion vested in trial courts, will be considered upon review for an abuse of discretion. It is the unusual and exceptional case where the determination of the trial court is set aside. Swanner v. United States, 5th Cir. 1969, 406 F.2d 716; Adams v. United States, 5th Cir. 1958, 260 F.2d 467, cert. den., 359 U.S. 934, 79 S.Ct. 649, 3 L.Ed.2d 635 (1959). The judges of the Court of Appeals might well feel that under like circumstances they would have exercised the judicial discretion in a manner different from that in which it was exercised by the trial court. But, this is not a basis for reversing the determination of the trial court. The test is whether there has been an abuse of that discretion and in this case we hold that there was no such abuse. 19 430 F.2d at 1215. Although that case involved a district court and not the Board, we think its reasoning is fully applicable here. Simply because an appellate court perceives that a fairer result might have been reached through the production of certain investigative notes, it does not follow that such production should be judicially mandated. The Board did not arbitrarily refuse disclosure in this case, cf., N. L. R. B. v. Capitol Fish Co., 5 Cir. 1961, 294 F.2d 868, to the contrary, it based its refusal to produce, at least in part, on a recognized evidentiary privilege-the qualified privilege that protects the internal deliberations of a government agency. Absent some showing of manifest injustice, the Board behavior must stand or fall on the existence vel non of that privilege and not on what this court perceives to be the fairest way for the Board to run its proceedings. Since we find, see Sec. B infra, that the Board's claim of privilege was legally justified, we refuse to abort the proceedings on the grounds that the Board did not follow some other procedure. 20 As further grounds for claiming that the Board proceedings were unfair, the company points out that its task of defending the back-pay claims was, in effect, impossible without the aid of the Board records. The key defensive issues in a back-pay hearing are whether the claimant had sufficiently attempted to mitigate his back-pay claim by seeking equivalent work or whether in refusing to accept a bona fide offer of reinstatement the claimant has waived his back-pay entitlement. See generally, N. L. R. B. v. Miami Coca-Cola Bottling Co., 5 Cir. 1966, 360 F.2d 569. Since much of the information regarding these questions is peculiarly within the province of the claimant's own mind, it is argued that it is unfair to preclude the company from having access to whatever relevant evidence the Board has that could be used to impeach the claimant's allegations of full mitigation efforts. That is particularly true, as the company points out, when most of the facts in issue took place some ten years earlier and the marshalling of defensive evidence is therefore all the more difficult. 21 Although this argument is logical on its face, it ignores the established law on the burden of proof in back-pay proceedings. In addition, it fails to give a fair account of the evidence available in the proceedings below. It is well established in this circuit and most others that the Board's primary duty in back-pay proceedings is to show the gross back-pay due each claimant. As Judge Wisdom stated in N. L. R. B. v. Mooney Aircraft, Inc., 5 Cir. 1966, 366 F.2d 809, 812-813: 22 While the General Counsel has the burden of proving unlawful discrimination on the part of the employer, and hence that backpay is due, the employer usually has the burden of establishing affirmative defenses which would mitigate his liability. NLRB v. Miami Coca-Cola Bottling Co., supra; NLRB v. Brown & Root, Inc., 8 Cir. 1963, 311 F.2d 447. Among these affirmative defenses are the unavailability of jobs because of nondiscriminatory factors, the employees' wilful loss of earnings, and employees' interim earnings to be deducted from the backpay award. (footnotes omitted) 23 See also, Winn-Dixie Stores, Inc. v. N. L. R. B., 5 Cir. 1969, 413 F.2d 1008, 1009; Florence Printing Co. v. N. L. R. B., 4 Cir. 1967, 37 F.2d 216, 222-223; N. L. R. B. v. Reynolds, 6 Cir. 1968, 399 F.2d 668, 669-670; cf. N. L. R. B. v. Mastro Plastics Corp., 2 Cir. 1965, 354 F.2d 170. 24 If the burden of proof is on the company, and not the Board, to show a failure of the claimant to mitigate fully his back-pay claim, a fortiori, there is no burden on the Board to gather this evidence and make it available. The fact that the Board might possibly possess 8 relevant evidence with potential value as impeachment material should not entitle the company ipso facto to a wholesale fishing expedition into the Board's files in derogation of the claimed privilege. 25 Although much can be said for a rule requiring the Board to open wide its files to all parties in proceedings such as these, we cannot forget that the Board's role in a back-pay proceeding is, in large part, to represent the interests of claimants who have already been adjudged to be entitled to reparations for the company's earlier transgressions of the Act. While we must never lose sight of the ultimate fact that the Board remains a governmental body, with concomitant obligations of impartiality in its functions, some concessions must be made to the Board's role as advocate on behalf of the public and of the victims of unfair labor practices. 9 In accommodating these necessarily conflicting roles, we believe the Board has adequately separated its prosecutorial arm from its judicial arm and that a private litigant can still get a fair hearing without the Board's role as an advocate suffering. In any event, Congress has chosen to amalgamate the Board's arms and we do not have the privilege of amputating them. Certainly, the burden of proof in back-pay proceedings, as enunciated in Mooney, is not so onerous as to require that the company be allowed to defend the back-pay claims with the Board's files in its hands. As with other prosecutorial and regulatory agencies, in order for the N.L.R.B. to fulfill its statutory duties, it must be accorded some semblance of evidentiary privilege to protect its informal investigatorial and trial-preparatory processes. See, e. g., United States v. Morgan, 1941, 313 U.S. 409, 61 S.Ct. 999, 85 L.Ed. 1429; N. L. R. B. v. Clement Brothers Co., 5 Cir. 1969, 407 F.2d 1027; Davis v. Braswell Motor Freight Lines, 3 Cir. 1964, 363 F.2d 600. 26 It is true that the behavior of the general counsel, the Board's prosecutorial arm, can be characterized as partisan, but we cannot say that this partisanship denied Rutter Rex a fair hearing. There is no allegation or showing that the trial examiner was in any way biased or that the Board did not accord a fair review to the trial examiner's findings. Numerous avenues for impeaching the claims were, in fact, available to the company. Literally all of the claimants were voluntarily produced by the general counsel 10 and were available for cross-examination under oath. The record indicates that the company received from the Board any statements made by these claimants that reasonably fell within the Board's Jencks rule. See note 12, infra. The back-pay specification provided the names of the claimants' interim employers and the interim earnings of each claimant. Furthermore, the general counsel supplied all of the claimants' Social Security records and the claimants themselves produced numerous documentary records pursuant to subpoena. In short, although it might have been difficult for the company to meet its burden under Mooney, we cannot say that it was impossible. The company was not, as it would have us believe, sent into the river without an oar. We refuse to find that a company cannot receive a fair hearing in a back-pay suit unless it has the broad access to Board investigatory files that was requested and denied here. The Supreme Court in Rutter Rex I, supra, 396 U.S. at 263, 90 S.Ct. 417, made it quite clear that this court serves a limited function when reviewing a back-pay award made by the Board. See also N.L.R.B. v. Seven-Up Bottling Co., 1953, 344 U.S. 344, 346, 73 S.Ct. 287, 97 L.Ed. 377. With this mandate in mind, we cannot, with the exception of the Watford claim, say that this record compels a finding that the company was denied a fair hearing. See N.L.R.B. v. Chambers Mfg. Co., 5 Cir. 1960, 278 F.2d 715, 716; N.L.R.B. v. Vapor Blast, supra. 27