Court Opinion

ID: 9652595
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-23 17:27:26.131638+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:12:52.734043
License: Public Domain

Weintraub, C. J.
(concurring). I cannot relate the doctrine of exhaustion of administrative remedies to the case before us. If plaintiff sued for reinstatement, the concept would be pertinent. But he here seeks money damages, a remedy he could not obtain administratively. That being so, what is gained by exhausting the administrative process? If plaintiff prevailed in that process, his relief would be reinstatement with net back pay and this he does not seek. If the administrative hearings went against him, could he nonetheless sue for damages? If he could, then there is no point in requiring him to pursue the adminis*571trative remedy of reinstatement. If he could not, it would be because his sole remedy is reinstatement with back pay. I think the real question is whether the employee’s remedy is thus limited, and for the answer we must look to the contract.
If the contract expressly stated the employer shall not discharge except for good cause, and then provided for an administrative remedy of reinstatement, it could be argued the administrative remedy was intended to be in addition to the legal remedy of damages at the option of the employee, rather than the exclusive mode of redress. But here we have no provision which could be so construed. Rather the limitation on the right to discharge appears in Rule 6-A-1, as follows:
“Employees shall not be suspended nor dismissed from the service without a fair and impartial trial. * * *”
Thus the restriction upon the right to discharge is only that it will not be exercised “without a fair and impartial trial.”
No doubt “a fair and impartial trial” imports a reasonable cause for dismissal (whether restricted to what the law would regard as just cause need not here be considered); but the element of “cause” is an ingredient of “a fair and impartial trial” and may not be severed from it and isolated and thus set up as a separate limitation upon the right to dismiss, to be vindicated in an action for damages upon a claim that the alleged “cause” is factually untrue. Rather an action at law, if one is at all possible, would have to be based upon a charge that a fair and impartial trial was denied, either in the procedural aspect or in the substantive (i. e., that the facts as charged are insufficient to justify dismissal). No such claim is here made.
I read the contract to provide that the employer curtails its right to discharge only to the extent of agreeing that an employee shall receive the prescribed trial and reinstatement with back pay. They are the employee’s sole right *572and sole remedy. The parties did not contract for anything else. It is one thing to condition the right to dismiss upon hearing with reinstatement and back pay; it is quite another to condition it upon the existence of legal cause and thus to invite a suit for damages with the attendant uncertainty as to amount. In short, plaintiff seeks to sue for breach of a promise not to dismiss except for cause, and there is no such unqualified promise in the agreement. And doubtless the contract was framed as it is to serve the wholesome purpose that these controversies be settled by a process which will bring to bear the intimate appreciation of labor-management problems possessed by those designated to sit in judgment.
Except as herein stated, I join in the majority opinion.