Court Opinion

ID: 9482650
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 08:56:28.358027+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:49:07.125296
License: Public Domain

EASTERBROOK, Circuit Judge,
dissenting.
Hill-Rom Company, dissatisfied with the work of its inspectors, changed their duties, pay, and title. “Inspector 3” and “Inspector 4” turned into “Quality Assurance Technician.” Hill-Rom wanted greater flexibility in both assignments and incentives than its collective bargaining agreement with the union allowed. Many an employer chafes under the work rules and pay structures embedded in such agreements. Employers may believe (or find it in their interest to believe) that new arrangements would be good for both labor and management but that the union resists even mutually beneficial changes. Hill-Rom reached this conclusion and put it to the test by direct bargaining. After the union balked at the proposed change, Hill-Rom made its offer directly to the employees. It described the duties and pay of a “Quality Assurance Technician” — a position that would be outside any union’s jurisdiction — and invited the inspectors to apply. Twelve of the fourteen did.
There are two ways to characterize what happened. One is that the employer changed the scope of the bargaining unit. Inspectors, initially within the union’s jurisdiction, have been removed from it. The other is that the employer changed the assignment of work while leaving the bargaining unit alone. Inspection work, initially assigned to employees represented by the union, has been assigned to employees who have spurned representation. These characterizations have dramatically different legal consequences. Because the scope of the unit is a “permissive” rather than “mandatory” subject of bargaining, the union has a veto (subject to override by the NLRB). By refusing to accept the employer’s proposal about jurisdiction, the union *460prevents the firm from making changes. Assignment of work, by contrast, is a mandatory subject of bargaining. After bargaining in good faith to impasse (as Hill-Rom did), an employer may put its final offer into force unilaterally.
Needless to say, the union prefers the first of the competing characterizations (change in jurisdiction) while Hill-Rom trumpets the second (change in assignment of work). The difficulty is that these often, and here, come to the same thing. Cases, including decisions by our superiors in the judicial hierarchy, establish that jurisdictional questions are permissive subjects of bargaining and that assignment disputes are mandatory subjects of bargaining. Neither the NLRB nor our court can do anything about this. Yet when the same facts can be put in either category with equal plausibility, the distinction collapses. Two things equal to the same thing are equal to each other — yet we are told by authority we cannot countermand that they are not equal.
What is to be done? When all comes down to a battle of characterization, the trier of fact must choose. Neither choice can be condemned as wrong, because in rhetorical contests of this variety there is no right or wrong. Review by the next level in the hierarchy of tribunals is correspondingly deferential. E.g., Cooter & Gell v. Hartmarx Corp., 496 U.S. 384, 110 S.Ct. 2447, 2457-61, 110 L.Ed.2d 359 (1990); Pierce v. Underwood, 487 U.S. 552, 557-63, 108 S.Ct. 2541, 2545-49, 101 L.Ed.2d 490 (1988); Mucha v. King, 792 F.2d 602, 604-06 (7th Cir.1986); Scandia Down Corp. v. Euroquilt, Inc., 772 F.2d 1423, 1427-29 (7th Cir.1985). Add the deference accorded to the Labor Board’s decisions — for it is to the Board, and not the courts, that Congress has delegated the resolution of labor disputes — and “what is to be done?” has a simple answer. Whichever way the Board decides, enforce its order. The Board found that “whatever differences existed between the final inspector and quality assurance technician classifications resulted from technological change and ... the job functions remained significantly unchanged. Accordingly, the new work title simply stood in the shoes of the old work title in the bargaining unit.” That is not an inevitable understanding of the change; perhaps it is not the best understanding. But deferential review requires us to accept it.
Proceeding as if we were deciding this case de novo, my colleagues prefer the employer’s characterization. They say that the reassignment at Hill-Rom cannot be distinguished from a reassignment of janitorial work that our court put in the “work assignment” bin. University of Chicago v. NLRB, 514 F.2d 942 (7th Cir.1975). It is indeed hard to distinguish our case from that one. It is even harder to distinguish our case from NLRB v. United Technologies Corp., 884 F.2d 1569 (2d Cir.1989), and NLRB v. Bay Shipbuilding Corp., 721 F.2d 187 (7th Cir.1983), which sifted the reassignments into the “jurisdictional change” bin. None of the three cases solves the problem; rather they define a problem for the Board to solve.
Start with Bay Shipbuilding. Shipwrights seek to minimize the amount of scrap created when they cut metal to make parts. The process is called “lofting.” Until recently lofting was done manually. Someone built models of the parts and moved them around by hand. Today the work may be done by computer. Feed the dimensions of the parts into its memory, and the computer decides which arrangement will minimize the amount of scrap metal. Lofting by hand and lofting by computer require some skills in common but some different skills. Bay Shipbuilding established lofting by computer as a new job and gradually moved both the work and its employees from manual to electronic lofting — the latter position outside the union's domain. The Board held that this altered the union’s jurisdiction in violation of the statute, and we enforced its order. It is hard to see the difference between the transfer from manual to digital lofting and the transfer from “Inspector 4” to “Quality Assurance Technician.”
United Technologies, like Bay Shipbuilding and our case, presented a claim of technological change followed by reassign*461ment of work. United Technologies employed about 235 “expediters,” who were supposed to know the location of vital parts in short supply and get them to production lines to prevent idle time. It also employed 76 “production inventory clerks,” who maintained inventories of these parts. The union’s jurisdiction included the expediters but not the clerks. United Technologies found the arrangement unsatisfactory, in part because the clerks’ information could be a whole day behind. It created a new job merging attributes of the expediters’ duties with the clerks’ and invited both to apply. Within a short time 77 of the expediters had changed jobs. United Technologies deemed the new position outside the union’s jurisdiction, but the Board held otherwise, and the court of appeals enforced that order. Any distinction between the change at Hill-Rom and the change at United Technologies is too small to perceive.
Dozens of similar cases pepper the books. The only other one I shall mention is University of Chicago, which holds center stage in the majority’s opinion. The University of Chicago Hospitals and Clinics is a warren of buildings. Dispensaries, operating and recovery rooms, laboratories, offices, and classrooms are scattered about the complex. Until 1971 janitors working for the University’s Biological Sciences Division and represented by Local 1657 cleaned the portions of the complex devoted to patients, while janitors working for the University’s Plant Department and represented by Local 321 cleaned the portions devoted to offices and classrooms. An archway in a long hall might mark the transition point. Frustrated by the inefficiency entailed in the arrangement and the Plant Department’s low standards of cleanliness (more suited to the Law School, where paper is the most serious contaminant), the University told the Biological Sciences Division to clean the whole complex. The Division needed extra’janitors to comply, and it hired some away from the Plant Department. University of Chicago characterizes this as a work transfer rather than a jurisdictional shift.
My colleagues are right to think it hard to distinguish University of Chicago from Hill-Rom’s case. But it is easier to do so than it is to distinguish Bay Shipbuilding or United Technologies. Neither Local 321 nor Local 1657 had jurisdiction of all janitorial work at the University. Before and after the transfer, each local represented some but not all of the janitors. Each union’s jurisdiction was defined by reference to the component in which its employees served. Local 321’s jurisdiction, for example, included “[sjervice and maintenance classifications in the Plant Department”. 514 F.2d at 946. Moving some custodial work from the Plant Department to the Biological Sciences Division did not affect that jurisdiction, although it meant that Local 321 would represent a smaller proportion of the University’s phalanx of janitors. It was correspondingly hard to find a change in the jurisdiction of either local.
Contrast the recognition clause in the agreement between Hill-Rom and Local 525: “The Company recognizes the Union as the sole and exclusive representative ... for all its production and maintenance employees, except for office and clerical employees ... research department employees, and all supervisory employees.” The formula “all employees except ...” is substantially more comprehensive than a formula such as “[sjervice and maintenance classifications in the Plant Department”. Hill-Rom needed to establish that the “Quality Assurance Technicians” were “research department employees”; only such a characterization would take them outside the union’s representation without a change in the union’s jurisdiction. Yet the employees were not shifted to “research”; they were the same inspectors as before with grandiloquent titles. So, at any rate, the Board found, and therefore we should enforce its order.