Court Opinion

ID: 9765395
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-29 04:01:46.969873+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:30:09.633142
License: Public Domain

HUTCHINSON, Justice,
dissenting.
I dissent. I believe that Mr. Chief Justice Nix’s opinion announcing the judgment of the Court presents another chapter in the twisted development of the doctrine of “lockout” in this Commonwealth as it relates to the Unemployment Compensation Act.1 Since our decision in Vrotney Unemployment Compensation Case, 400 Pa. 440, 163 A.2d 91 (1960), we have allowed the term “status quo ante” to be distorted and strained almost beyond recognition. In the process, I believe that we have created an unworkable and illogical standard. Originally adopted as a guideline for decision on the issue, it has become a talismanic substitute *276for the judicial discrimination which is needed to apply the statutory distinction to specific cases. Indeed, the guideline adopted to serve the legislative intent has mastered the meaning of the word lockout which the statute uses. A review of our decisions illustrates this development.
In Vrotney, the union sought wage and benefit increases totaling fourteen cents per hour. The company offered six cents per hour and the elimination of all incentive pay. The record showed that most workers would lose money under the company’s plan. The union offered to continue working under the old contract; the company refused and implemented the new scheme. We held that the “status quo ante” was the old contract and found a lockout because the company refused the union’s offer to continue working under it. Subsequently, in Unemployment Compensation Board v. Sun Oil Co., 476 Pa. 589, 383 A.2d 519 (1978), the company agreed to an extension of the existing contract. After five weeks the company implemented certain changes and planned to implement others. The union then voted to strike. We held that even five weeks after its expiration the contract requirements defined the “status quo ante.” The company’s unilateral modification of this contractually defined “status quo ante” created a lockout. We did not expressly consider whether this resulted from a legal requirement that the contract and all its terms remain in effect for unemployment compensation purposes, or whether the parties’ extension of its provisions froze the “status quo ante.” There is a difference between continuing the contract and preserving the status quo. In Fairview School District v. Commonwealth, Unemployment Compensation Board of Review, 499 Pa. 539, 454 A.2d 517 (1982), we again failed to address that difference. After the contract there expired, the school board and the union agreed to work for sixty days as under the old contract. Teachers were paid at the levels in effect on the last day of the expired contract. The union claimed, however, that increased wages extrapolated from the wage increase schedule in the expired contract should be paid to the *277teachers. We held that the “status quo ante” was the compensation in effect at the contract’s expiration, not the increased compensation which would result from wage increases extrapolated from the expired contract. Since the “status quo ante” existing before the work stoppage was maintained, we held the teachers were on strike, not locked out. Finally, in Local 730 v. Commonwealth, Unemployment Compensation Board of Review, 505 Pa. 480, 480 A.2d 1000 (1984), the union and company agreed to continue working under the old contract until June 15. On June 18, the company implemented a new wage and benefit plan which improved the workers’ compensation. Work continued under the increases until July 20 when the union voted to strike. The majority held that the “status quo ante” was the expired contract and, by improving the compensation package, the company disturbed it. Thus, we held that the workers were locked out because their employer increased their compensation. Today Mr. Chief Justice Nix states that the “status quo ante” is not the wage and benefit package in place when the contract expired, but the package that should have been in effect. The term has thus come full circle. It no longer means the conditions in the workplace before a work stoppage, but those conditions which are administratively or judicially found to be proper by contract or custom.
These ad hoc determinations of the “status quo ante” strip the doctrine of stability and predictability. Collective bargaining is a complex process of balancing risks against benefits. The least we owe the parties are clear standards to predict the legal effect of their actions. In an effort to bring some stability to the application of the unemployment compensation law to collective work stoppages, I would hold that the “status quo ante” distinguishes a strike from a lockout when the employer unilaterally changes it to the employees’ detriment. I would define the “status quo ante” as the situation actually in effect at the contract’s expiration, without regard to what would have happened if the contract had continued in force. In this case, that actual *278situation included the Board’s health plan, not the plan the arbitrator awarded. This definition seems to me to best serve the purposes of the Unemployment Compensation Act to compensate those who are out of work through no fault of their own, with minimal impact on the ongoing bargaining process.
I must also disagree with Mr. Chief Justice Nix’s conclusion that this work stoppage, if it began as a lockout, was not converted into a strike by the Board’s offer of September 6, 1981 to reinstate Blue Cross/Blue Shield coverage upon the teachers’ return to work. The Chief Justice says that the lockout was not converted into a strike because the teachers had to return to work before Blue Cross/Blue Shield coverage was restored. If, however, coverage had been restored first the lockout would have been converted into a strike.
I believe that this is an overly technical semantic distinction, and largely undermines our holding in High v. Unemployment Compensation Board of Review, 505 Pa. 379, 479 A.2d 967 (1984). In High, we held that a lockout could be converted into a strike if the reason for the work stoppage changes, and that determination should be made on a weekly basis. We said, “The policy of Section 402(d) [of the Unemployment Compensation Law] is one of discouraging employers or employees from initiating or continuing work stoppages[.]” Id., 505 Pa. at 383, 479 A.2d at 969. Here the Board tried to end a work stoppage. Whether Blue Cross/Blue Shield coverage was reinstated before the workers’ return or upon their return, to my mind, misses the point. The Board took steps to end this work stoppage. Had the teachers accepted, they would have returned to work with the Blue Cross/Blue Shield coverage. Mr. Chief Justice Nix states that the lack of this coverage justified treatment of the work stoppage as a lockout. It was in their power to grasp the hand held out and act in the interest of the real victims of this imbroglio, the students. The question of which comes first seems trivial to me. Such an analysis only injects more pettiness and triviality *279into the serious business of collective bargaining, without serving the purpose of Section 402(d), to compensate employees who are out of work because their employer locked them out of their place of employment when they refused to take a cut in pre-existing pay, benefits or privileges. As such, it interferes with the applicable statutes on collective bargaining and offers no help in determining who, among those engaged in a collective work stoppage, are entitled to collect benefits because they are merely trying to maintain what they have against economic coercion and those who are not because they have voluntarily withheld their labor in order to extract more by the same means.
Accordingly, I would reverse Commonwealth Court and hold that a lockout did not exist initially and that, in any évent, the union’s rejection of the School Board’s offer of September 6, 1981 converted the work stoppage into a strike.

. Act of December 5, 1936, P.L. 2897, as amended, 43 P.S. §§ 751-914.