Opinion ID: 733366
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Edition # 2 of the Your Choice Newsletter

Text: 34 The ALJ found that the Company had additionally violated § 8(a)(1) through a combination of items it published in the second edition of its Your Choice newsletter distributed to salaried employees. In the Board's view the items in effect threatened layoffs of salaried employees if they voted in favor of unionization. Allegheny Ludlum, 320 N.L.R.B. at 484, 490-92. First, there was an interview of a former union member who stated that if it came to a layoff due to a lack of work, the first people to be laid off would be those in the Union. Second was the cartoon of a Union rat pulling the job security blanket off a sleeping employee. Finally, there was an ominous reference to the Company's past attempts to keep the salaried employees' jobs intact. After describing past poor business conditions, layoffs of union employees, and a recent strike, the newsletter noted that [i]n all of these cases, the Company found ways to manage the situation without resorting to layoffs of salaried employees. The message was clear--it would not look so hard in the future, if the Union won. 35 In Gissel, the Supreme Court reviewed the Board's holding that an employer had violated § 8(a)(1) by two speeches in which the company's president told the employees that the Union's only economic weapon was its ability to call for a strike, and warned that a strike could lead to plant closings and layoffs, and by two pamphlets sent to employees in which the employer claimed that the Union was strike-happy, and listed local companies that had gone out of business because of unreasonable Union demands. See Gissel, 395 U.S. at 587-89, 89 S.Ct. at 1926-27. The Court, while acknowledging the employer's freedom of expression protected by § 8(c), held that these communications constituted unfair labor practices in violation of § 8(a)(1) because associating unionization with adverse consequences for employees is protected only if it is merely a prediction as to the precise effects [the employer] believes unionization will have on his company, and not an implication that an employer may or may not take action solely on his own initiative for reasons unrelated to economic necessities and known only to him. The latter type of statement is an unlawful threat of retaliation for employee unionization, id. at 618, 89 S.Ct. at 1942, and this is how the ALJ and the Board treated the communications in this case. 36 In reviewing the Board's finding, we must recognize the Board's competence in the first instance to judge the impact of utterances made in the context of the employer-employee relationship. Gissel, 395 U.S. at 620, 89 S.Ct. at 1943 (quoting NLRB v. Virginia Elec. & Power Co., 314 U.S. 469, 479, 62 S.Ct. 344, 349, 86 L.Ed. 348 (1941)). Under this standard, and applying the criteria distinguishing permissible from impermissible employer communications set out in Gissel, we agree with the Board's finding that Your Choice, Edition # 2 violated the Act because three elements of that newsletter--the Karen Gallagher interview, the cartoon, and the statement that salaried employees had retained their jobs in the past because the Company had found ways to keep them on the rolls--combined to create an unlawful threat that the Company would retaliate against salaried employees if they elected to be represented by the Union. 37 As our colleague observes in her partial dissent, judges must be sensitive to the context in which employer statements are made, when determining whether they include threats or promises that violate the Act. See concurring and dissenting opinion at 21; but see id. at 22-23 n. 2 (Having conceded [that the Karen Gallagher interview did not violate the Act by its inclusion in the video, the Board] cannot also argue that the same statements violate the Act if included in a newsletter.). This insight is helpful insofar as the newsletter's threat of reprisal arose from the combination of three elements of the newsletter; that is, each element must be considered in the context of the others, rather than in vacuo. But see id. at 21-22 (analyzing each of the three elements of the newsletter in vacuo). The general context in which Your Choice, Edition # 2 was distributed was a unionization campaign in which job security was foremost among the salaried employees' concerns, and in which the Union had campaigned on the ground that it could increase job security for the salaried employees. In this context a salaried employee would no doubt be troubled by the statement, spoken by an employee but quoted in a Company newsletter and thus demonstrably concurred in by the employer, that if it came to a layoff due to lack of work, the first people to be laid off would be those in the Union. 12 A reader considering joining the Union would presumably want to know why being in the Union makes one more likely to face the ax; if this tendency on the part of the employer is motivated by the bare fact of Union membership, such a reader will have a powerful incentive to vote against Union representation which the Union is helpless to counteract. Add to this the cartoon in which a Union rat pulls the Secure Job blanket off of a sleeping employee, which our colleague interprets as a statement, albeit a blunt one, that AL employees currently enjoy job security. Concurring and dissenting opinion at 22. We think the more natural interpretation is that the election of Union representation would lead to a decline in job security--the Union rat is, after all, pulling off the Secure Job blanket. The Gallagher quote and the cartoon thus reinforce each other in conveying the employer's threat that if the salaried employees elected Union representation the employer would react by increasing layoffs, and the newsletter includes no statement or information to counteract the threatening implication that such a result would be the product of the employer's unilateral action--that it would be, in other words, the employer's retaliation against the employees for bringing in the Union. The newsletter's only hint of an explanation as to why the Company treats unionized employees differently from non-unionized employees with regard to layoffs actually served to intensify the threatening character of the employer's message: the Company explained that in the past it had found ways to keep the non-unionized salaried employees on board. Thus the Company conveyed the following message to the salaried employees: the Company found ways to avoid laying you off when you were not represented by the Union, but is more inclined to lay off workers who are represented by the Union, and by electing Union representation you will be letting yourselves in for a decline in job security. 13 38 Applying the analysis articulated by the Supreme Court in Gissel to these employer communications, it is clear that we have even greater support for upholding the Board's finding of an unlawful threat of retaliation than did the Gissel Court. In Gissel, the Court upheld the Board's finding of a threat of reprisal based on an employer's speeches, pamphlets, leaflets, and letters combining to convey the message that the company was in a precarious financial condition; that the 'strike-happy' union would in all likelihood have to obtain its potentially unreasonable demands by striking, the probable result of which would be a plant shutdown, as the past history of labor relations in the area indicated; and that the employees in such a case would have great difficulty finding employment elsewhere. Gissel, 395 U.S. at 619, 89 S.Ct. at 1943. Because the employer conveyed this message without having any support for its basic assumption that the union would have to strike to be heard, or for its assertion that local plant closings were attributable to unionism, and because the Board had often found that employees take such hints as coercive threats rather than honest forecasts, the Court upheld the Board's finding that this message was a threat of reprisal and therefore a violation of the Act. Id. at 619-20, 89 S.Ct. at 1942-43. The Gissel Court thus upheld the Board's finding of a violation even though the employer's proffered link between unionization and layoffs was explicitly premised on an intervening causal factor within the union's control--the decision to strike. In that case the union at least had some recourse to parry the employer's thrust, since the union could respond by asserting that it would not strike if it thought that doing so would force the company to lay off its members. In the case at bar, no such defense was available to the Union. Even if the Union could have convinced the salaried employees that it would act responsibly, with a view to economic circumstances and the workers' best interests, it could not dull the impact of the Company's threat to lay off salaried employees in retaliation for their having elected Union representation. 39 The Company argues on appeal that this ruling contradicted this circuit's recent treatment of similar employer communications in Crown Cork & Seal v. N.L.R.B., 36 F.3d 1130 (D.C.Cir.1994), and Somerset Welding & Steel v. N.L.R.B., 987 F.2d 777 (D.C.Cir.1993). But we find that the absolved communications in those two cases were significantly different from the threatening combination of messages contained in the second edition of the Your Choice newsletter. 40 The employer communications in Crown Cork & Seal featured assertions that the Union had a bad record in protecting job security, and this statement: WE WILL NOT BRING WORK INTO THIS PLANT--AND OUR CUSTOMER WILL SEEK OTHER ALTERNATIVES--IF THAT WORK CAN'T BE DONE AT A REASONABLE COST, a cost that allows both of us to make a fair return on our investment. Crown Cork & Seal, 36 F.3d at 1133. We disagreed with the Board's holding that this statement was a threat of retaliation for unionization, and observed that by referring to the pressure of economic necessity and the probable effects that wage increases would have, the company was simply identifying circumstances beyond its control, rather than connecting post-unionization layoffs to discretionary decisions it might make solely on the basis of its opposition to unionization. Id. at 1137. Specifically, the company's dour prediction was based on the facts that the company and the union had entered into a Master Agreement which triggered automatic wage increases for newly-unionized employees, and that the market for the company's product was very tight, which meant that wage-related cost increases could well make it impossible for the company to compete. Id. at 1132-33. 41 The employer communications addressed in Somerset Welding & Steel involved a supervisor's showing employees a financial report indicating that the company's profit margin was quite narrow and his telling the employees there'd be no way that the shop could continue to go in the event of wage increases, along with a chairman's statements that unionization at other companies in the area had led to plant closings, and that any increases in employee wages could threaten the company's ability to compete and might necessitate a restructuring of employee benefits. Somerset Welding & Steel, 987 F.2d at 780; Somerset Welding & Steel, 314 N.L.R.B. 829, 830-31 (1994). Finding insufficient record evidence to support the ALJ's findings that these communications violated the Act, we remanded them to the Board. (The Board had not originally passed on these findings, having concluded that a remedial bargaining order was required by other violations in any event.) On remand, the Board itself held that they did not violate the Act. See Somerset Welding & Steel, 314 N.L.R.B. at 830-31. 42 Crown Cork & Seal and Somerset Welding & Steel addressed employer statements that linked unionization to the loss of job security by referring expressly to factors outside of the employer's control--union pressure to increase wages and market conditions. The employers in those two cases were communicating to employees their prediction that if the employees voted to unionize, the companies would be obliged to increase wages for the newly-unionized employees, and this in turn would damage the employers' ability to attract business in light of market conditions. See Bok, supra, at 77 (When the employer declares that he will have to move or close down if a union comes in and obtains higher wages, union organizers can reply that their negotiators will take account of the company's position and endeavor not to induce its departure from the area.... [M]uch may turn on whether the employees understand that the employer will close down only if economic considerations impel him to do so....). 43 In contrast to such predictive communications, the second edition of Your Choice in effect told salaried employees that unionization would lead to layoffs and a loss of job security because once the salaried employees chose union representation the Company would no longer find ways to avoid laying them off in hard times. 14 This implied threat distinguishes the case from Crown Cork & Seal and Somerset Welding & Steel, and justifies the ALJ in holding that this employer communication fell on the threat of retaliation side of the Gissel dividing line.