Court Opinion

ID: 9493760
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 15:18:42.273613+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:56:01.571818
License: Public Domain

POSNER, Circuit Judge,
concurring.
I join the court’s opinion, and write separately only to flag two issues for possible future consideration either by the Labor *892Board or, in an appropriate case, which this is not, a reviewing court.
The Board relies, with regard to Anderson, the employee to whom the company offered a promotion to management rank, on the conventional principle that offering a promotion is one method of interfering with a union organizing campaign, and with regard to Oiler, the employee fired for shipping the wrong items, on the equally conventional principle that failure to impose discipline uniformly can be evidence of discrimination against a union supporter. Both principles have a role to play in unfair labor practices cases, but it is a role to be played with caution, as neither the Board nor (fatally) the company recognizes.
The idea that the carrot is as potent as the stick, and therefore that it is as “coercive” to offer a union supporter a promotion to management as it is to fire him, is unsound. Most workers welcome a promotion, and so a company that has a practice of promoting union supporters to get them out of the bargaining unit, the group of workers that vote on whether to unionize the unit, will actually increase the expected income of being a union supporter. The more eager the company is to buy off union supporters, the more union supporters there will be. So likely, therefore, is such a tactic of discouraging unionization to backfire that the Board should hesitate to infer such a motive from the offer of promotion.
Oiler received the stick, not the carrot; but the use of evidence of nonuniformity in the imposition of discipline to support an inference to discrimination has a downside that, again, neither the Board nor the company in this case recognizes. If a company risks legal trouble by exercising lenience in the enforcement of its work rules, it will have an incentive to enforce those rules in a uniform and therefore harsh manner. Lenience will be out. Workers as a whole may suffer. It does not follow that evidence of discriminatory enforcement should be inadmissible, because having strict rules on attendance or performance but enforcing them only against union supporters would be a potent method of discouraging unionization. But the downside to this type of evidence that I have pointed to is an argument for the Board’s resolving close cases against an inference of discrimination. Oiler’s was a close case, given the number and gravity of his mistakes, but the company has failed to argue that close cases should be resolved in favor of the company for the sake of other workers, workers who might receive lenient treatment were it for the company’s fear that lenience toward a worker who happened not to be a union supporter would be used as evidence of an unfair labor practice.