Court Opinion

ID: 9456585
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-04 19:57:20.04539+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:35:02.164809
License: Public Domain

HAYNSWORTH, Chief Judge
(dissenting) :
I would affirm dismissal of this complaint for the arbitrators specifically limited their award to a ninety-day period preceding the filing of the grievance. The company has paid that award, and there appear to be live issues as to the substantive rights and liabilities of the parties under the collective bargaining agreement which ought to be resolved under the provisions of that agreement by a board of arbitration and not by the court.
Article IV, Section 1 of the agreement clearly gives the employer the right to create new jobs and to set job rates for them, subject, of course, to subsequent negotiation with the union. It was the employer who set the grade 4 job rate for the operator of the cutting machine around which this dispute is centered. Later, according to the company’s contention, when it became necessary to assign a helper to the cutter-operator, the company in informal discussions with the union set up the new job of helper and baler operator as a grade 3, and this arrangement was acceptable to the union’s area director. The company neglected, however, to give the union’s executive committee formal written notification of it.
About a year later this grievance was filed — the union’s theory being that, because of the absence of written notice to its executive committee, the grade 3 jobs had not been properly established and, since the helper-baler-operator was doing some of the things within the job description of the grade 4 cutter operator he was entitled to grade 4 pay. This led the company on October 31, 1967 to give the union’s executive committee belated formal written notice of the creation of the group 3 positions.
The union’s claim that the group 3’s on the baler machine were entitled to be paid at group 4 rates went to arbitration at the union’s request. The arbitrators generally accepted the union’s theory, but they declined to consider anything that happened after the date on which the grievance was filed, and they limited the back pay award to ninety days— apparently the ninety days preceding the *1363filing of the grievance. On the union’s petition for clarification of its award, the arbitrators explicitly refused to consider the company’s letter of October 31, 1967, or its effect under Article IV Section 1 of the agreement. This, the arbitrators said, was a separate issue which would require a separate submission. Again, the arbitrators declined to give any prospective effect to their award.
The live issue, of course, is whether the written notice contained in the company’s letter of October 31, 1967 was sufficient to permit the company to treat the baler operators as new jobs which it had classified as group 3’s. The company’s contention is that it was a sufficient curative of its earlier formal omission, while I suppose that the union would contend that it should be given no effect because of its tardiness. In any event there is an active dispute between the parties as to the meaning and interpretation of their contract in that respect, and they have bound themselves to commit such disputes to arbitration.
The court, I think, should respect the agreement to arbitrate such disputes. This court should not undertake to decide that issue, and yet the failure to mention Section 1 of Article IV in the penultimate paragraph of the majority opinion may lead to a construction that the majority has decided the issue without even discussing it.
Nor should the District Court be required to hold a hearing. If something happened on October 31, 1967, or any other date, which would affect the presumptive right of these group 3’s to group 4 pay, that is a matter for the arbitrators.
Labor relations can be conducted very satisfactorily when written agreements are respected and reasonably enforced. When they contain arbitration agreements, both respect and reasonable enforcement require that the courts restrict themselves to enforcement of arbitration awards, and that they do not undertake initially to decide live controversies or issue decrees which may be regarded by arbitrators as foreclosing their performance of their adjudicatory function.
Since everyone agrees that the company has strictly complied with the award, and since the arbitrators declined to pass on this issue on the ground that it would require a new submission, I think the District Judge properly dismissed this complaint, leaving the parties to the contractual remedies for which they bargained.