Court Opinion

ID: 9715592
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-26 06:09:37.488832+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:23:36.184425
License: Public Domain

*671O’Hara, J.
(dissenting). The able and experienced trial judge and my two esteemed colleagues state the issues as follow:
"Three questions appear to be involved in the determination of this litigation. It must first be decided whether or not the severance policy was a contract. If it was a contract, then were the plaintiffs involuntarily terminated? And if they were, was there another 'suitable opening’ within the definition of the terms?”.
I am obligated to disagree. The questions of involuntary termination and the availability and definition of "suitable” openings are, in my view, really part of a second major issue. I .take the liberty of restating the question on appeal as I conceive it.
1) Was there a contract between plaintiffs and their employer?
2) Assuming there were, was it breached? And if so, by whom?
3) If it were breached did the aggrieved parties prove damages reasonably within the contemplation of the contract?
Assuming that the requirements of Cain v Allen Electric & Equipment Co, 346 Mich 568; 78 NW2d 296 (1956), to establish a contract were fulfilled and thus conceding that an implied contract existed, the inquiry arises, what were its terms? In Cain, supra, the Court addressed itself consistently throughout the opinion to the necessity of mutuality, viz., "The cooperation desired was to be mutual” (Cain at p 579; 78 NW2d at 301). If such be a requirement the record hardly bespeaks any cooperation on the part of plaintiffs in this case. It was certainly the right of defendant to sell its division, if it chose. It was as much the right of plaintiffs to oppose it. It was not their right as I understand *672the applicable law to engage in a course of conduct that was clearly directed to undermining and defeating the company’s attempt to sell the division. Thus to me, question two in my statement of issues could only be answered that if a contract were established it was plaintiffs who breached it and not the defendant.
I do not understand by what reasoning the trial court and my colleagues read into the supposed implied contract the requirement that "suitable” employment could not be with the purchaser just as well as with another division of defendant itself. This is the more true when all the terms of their former employment were included in their continued employment with the purchaser (save a bonus agreement). All of the foregoing does not even include the fact that plaintiffs, in fact, refused the offered employment voluntarily and automatically placed themselves beyond the terms of the supposed implied contract.
It is a fact of present day economic life that employees operating through a designated collective bargaining representative can and do hammer out tough terms of limitation on employers relating to sale or transfer of a location of any part of an employer’s business. Limitations are imposed by Federal law on "runaway” plants. This is all to the good, and both parties know this when they face each other across the bargaining table. It is not the place of courts, however, as I see it, to incorporate these kinds of conditions into the relationship between a business and its salaried executive employees.
As far as I can see plaintiffs made out no case for establishing a contract with any ascertainable terms. If they did, the necessary terms thereof were breached by their own conduct. Hence I do *673not reach the question of damages. Summary judgment for plaintiffs was improperly granted. If there still is summary judgment in Michigan it should have been granted to defendants.
I would remand to the trial court for entry of a judgment of no cause of action with costs to the defendant.