Court Opinion

ID: 8881526
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2022-11-26 20:41:13.24101+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:06:40.774903
License: Public Domain

McGOWAN, Circuit Judge
(dissenting) :
The majority opinion states quite correctly, I believe, the principles which govern the propriety of a withdrawal of bargaining recognition, i.e., a reasonable basis in fact to doubt the existence of a majority, and a good faith assertion of that doubt. My difference with my colleagues is solely as to whether there is adequate evidentiary support for the Board’s finding in No. 21,690 that the timing of the employer’s claim of doubt admitted of the conclusion that it was intended to serve purposes other than merely denying the unions’ right to speak for a majority of the employees. I think the facts of record made that a permissible, if not a necessary, inference; and it is only the former that is needed to foreclose judicial rejection of the Board’s determinations.
Petitioners were old and familiar faces at the employer’s plant and bargaining *815table. The severe troubles of the 1960 strike undoubtedly produced a lot of freeloaders in the form of new employees who were happy to have the unions negotiate increased benefits for them without themselves paying union dues. There is nothing to suggest that the employer would have welcomed a new union in place of petitioners, who had been around so long; and the employer was, without any visible concern about petitioners’ possible minority status, ready to sign an agreement on terms reached after several months of bargaining, provided that the unions settled their lawsuits deriving from the strike.
The conditions were, thus, certainly present for a use of the threat of withdrawing bargaining recognition to achieve an objective unrelated to majority or minority status. The conclusion drawn by the Board from these circumstances is within a zone of inferential reasonableness, and I would, with all respect, let it alone.