Court Opinion

ID: 9482626
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 08:55:48.950249+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:49:06.363055
License: Public Domain

BUCKLEY, Circuit Judge,
concurring:
We have rejected one of the two grounds on which the National Labor Relations Board based its decision to set aside the Williams Enterprises employees’ decertifi-cation petition. Therefore, the Board must now decide whether the remark made by a Williams representative in answer to a question posed at the August 1987 meeting of prospective employees, namely, that the company “did intend to operate the Richmond plant as a nonunion plant,” Joint Appendix at 5, was sufficiently prejudicial to taint the December 1987 petition. If, on remand, the Board should be of that opinion, it must then decide on the appropriate remedy to deal with Williams’s subsequent refusal to bargain with the union.
As the NLRB has shown a disconcerting tendency to treat a bargaining order as a remedy of first rather than last resort, see, e.g., Avecor, Inc. v. NLRB, 931 F.2d 924, *1241938-39 (D.C.Cir.1991), I think it useful to remind the Board that “effectuating ascertainable employee free choice [is] as important a goal as deterring employer misbehavior,” NLRB v. Gissel Packing Co., 395 U.S. 575, 614, 89 S.Ct. 1918, 1940, 23 L.Ed.2d 547 (1969); and that an order that would preclude a union representation election (or the circulation of a decertification petition) is appropriate
only where the unfair practices have so intimidated employees that an election, even with the full complement of traditional NLRB remedies, would not reflect their true sentiments.
Avecor, 931 F.2d at 935. Therefore, if the Board should decide to issue such an order, it must provide a reasoned explanation of why Williams’s unfair labor practices are of “such a nature that their coercive effects cannot be eliminated by the application of traditional remedies.” Gissel Packing Co., 395 U.S. at 614, 89 S.Ct. at 1940 (internal quotation marks and citation omitted); see also Avecor, 931 F.2d at 937-39.