Court Opinion

ID: 9493965
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 15:25:04.333125+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:56:08.437238
License: Public Domain

PLAGER, Senior Circuit Judge,
concurring.
I concur in the result, though I find the case closer, and more troubling, than my colleagues. That the employee here was a problem employee is without doubt. Whether the last chance agreement (LCA) was unwise, in the sense that perhaps the agency should have stuck to its firing guns in the first instance, is an open question. Once having entered into the LCA, however, the agency, as well as the employee, was bound by its terms. Under the terms of the agreement the employee was charged with violating the LCA by failing “to be on duty during scheduled duty hours.” Exactly where she was during some parts of the day in question is not entirely clear, though she is not charged with being away from the building where she worked.
What does the LCA mean by failing to be “on duty” while at the office? That is, for me, not so obvious. Is taking a coffee break such a failure? Going to the bathroom? Even gossiping at the water cooler? I doubt that the agency would dismiss *1341an employee for any of those acts alone, even if it meant the employee was in fact away from her desk and her papers, and even if the departure was without specific permission from some supervisor, presumably located elsewhere in the building. Of course, the employee here was not just any employee, but was under the LCA. That may have limited her range of action, even severely, but only if the LCA so specified.
Whether resolving government labor-management disputes through these LCA’s is good public policy is debatable. One need not decide that issue to recognize that often they are sources of further conflict between the dissatisfied employing agency and the equally dissatisfied employee. Be that as it may, once there is such an agreement, the parties should have to live with it. When the agreement contains a provision as broad and as ambiguous as this “on duty” one, I would have thought a better process would have been for the Board to give the employee at least a hearing in the matter, rather than this back-of-the-hand dismissal without a hearing.
If you accept the AJ’s fact finding, sustained by a divided Board, comb the record for support, and construe the agreement in the Government’s favor, the result is sustainable under our standard of review.