Court Opinion

ID: 9467958
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 02:00:41.704359+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:38:41.018735
License: Public Domain

CORNELIA G. KENNEDY, Circuit Judge,
dissenting.
I respectfully dissent. At the time of the election the GAIU was representing the employees in arbitration proceedings seeking back wages claimed to be owing. The GAIU handbill contained the following statement:
As the company stated in their presentation to the employees, the GAIU has a case pending in Court regarding the “lost” $.45 wage increase. It would be to the Company’s advantage if the GAIU was defeated in the election and would ultimately decide not to spend the remaining members’ dues in an effort to collect the lost wage increase for its former members. This would relieve the Company of an approximately $4,000 pending liability per each affected member.
I agree with the dissenting member of the Board that this statement was “an impermissible threat ... to abandon the bargaining representative’s statutory duty to represent the unit membership after the election.” The majority of the Board, concentrating on the GAIU’s intention, held that the intent of the language was to negate implications in an earlier letter of the employer. It found that
[n]owhere does the Intervenor [GAIU] indicate an intention to abandon its efforts to collect the disputed wages.... [i]n our view, the Intervenor was merely describing what the Employer would wish to have happen should the Intervenor [GAIU] lose the election.
The problem with the Board’s holding is that is not what the leaflet says. It does not say that this is what the employer wants the GAIU to do. Rather it threatens that this is what the GAIU will do if not re-elected. We must read the language as it would be likely to be understood by the ordinary reader. It is what was said that is important, not what was intended to be said. Certainly the statement here was “reasonably susceptible of coercive implications.” G. H. Hess, 82 N.L.R.B. 462 (1979). Our Court stated in Plastic Masters, Inc. v. N. L. R. B., 512 F.2d 449, 450 (6th Cir. 1975):
... in our opinion the intent or absence of intent on the part of the Union to influence the employees’ votes by the overpayments is not a controlling factor. Whether the conduct of the Union was intended to influence the vote, these actions “undoubtedly had a tendency to influence the election results.” Collins & Aikman Corp. v. N. L. R. B., 383 F.2d 722, 729 (4th Cir. 1967).
In a decision in which it relied on our Court’s holding in Plastic Masters, the Fifth Circuit explained:
The intent test is inconsistent with the logic behind these holdings [setting aside representation elections]. The effects of an act intended to influence an election may be so minimal that the outcome remains unaffected. Conversely an unintentional act may have such a deleterious effect on the conduct of an election that the result does not reflect the voters’ free will. In determining whether an election should be invalidated, the focus should be on the effects of a particular act on the *416electorate rather than on the actor’s intent.
N. L. R. B. v. Gulf States Canners, Inc., 585 F.2d 757, 759 (5th Cir. 1978).
The threat here could not but have a tendency to influence the outcome of the voting. Employees who might have wished to vote for “no union,” as well as those who might have wished to vote for the Pressmen, may have voted for the GAIU so as not to lose their claims to the back wages. The panel fails to discuss the effect on the election of the Union’s threat.
In addition, the majority of the Court suggests that the overstatements of the wage differential between Pressmen and GAIU plants were not misleading under Diamond Electronics Division of Arvin Systems, Inc. v. N. L. R. B., 570 F.2d 156 (6th Cir. 1977). The Board never analyzed the misleading nature of these statements. It simply asserted that the statements did not require setting the election aside. In Diamond the union overstated by 40 percent the wage increase it won in a bargaining session. Our Court ruled that “[t]his was a material misrepresentation with respect to wage rates, a matter of great concern to employees.” Id. at 157. In this case the GAIU overstated the average wage differential between the GAIU represented Dayton plant and the Pressmen represented York and Fayetteville plants by 78 percent and 88 percent, respectively. This is more misleading than the statements at issue in Diamond.
The panel suggests the overstatements were not misleading because they conveyed the “essentially correct message that the GAIU had won higher wages for its members than the Pressmen.” By the same token, the overstatement at issue in Diamond conveyed the “essentially correct” message that the union had won a wage increase for its members. Diamond forecloses the conclusion that such an “essentially correct” message is not materially misleading. I also disagree that this case is distinguishable from Diamond merely because the otherwise misleading statements were accurate with respect to one out of thirty-five job categories.
The majority further states that Diamond is distinguishable in that the union making the misstatement in Diamond won the election while the GAIU which made the wage overstatement here was the loser in the runoff election. The majority’s position appears to be based on the assumption that the GAIU’s misleading statements could only have hurt the Pressmen; that they could not have influenced the employees to vote union in preference to “no union.” I disagree. The employees might well have believed that a company which paid its workers in different cities substantially different wages for comparable work is unfair, and that the protection of a union is necessary for employees of that company.
The GAIU received 20 votes less in the runoff election than it received in the first election. Had half of those 20 votes been given to the employer, the parties in the runoff election would have been the employer and the Pressmen. We can only speculate as to what the outcome of an election not influenced by material misrepresentations would have been. The Board should have required a new election. I would deny enforcement of the Board’s order.