Court Opinion

ID: 9452358
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-04 17:38:14.435885+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:33:10.955404
License: Public Domain

BOREMAN, Circuit Judge
(dissenting) :
Most respectfully I state my disagreement with the majority decision enforcing the Board’s order.
Two members of the N. L. R. B. expressed their views in a note of dissent and I find their approach to be most reasonable and fully justified in the circumstances here. The dissenters stated, in part, as follows:
« * -x- * Thg statute requires that an employer bargain over wages, hours, and conditions of employment. Here, an employer has voluntarily provided cafeterias for his employees. An independent contractor furnishes the food and sets the prices. Employees may also bring their lunches and eat them in the cafeterias. There is no complusion to buy or to bring lunches; indeed, only 40-45 percent of the work force makes use of the cafeterias. In this case, a union, one of three in the plants, proposes that the prices, including the most recent increase of a penny-a-cup on carryout coffee and 5 cents on hot items, be the subject of mandatory bargaining. Since there is joint, although limited use, of the cafeterias, the bargaining over the prices on each item on the menus by each of the three unions has the potential for extensive preemption of management and employee time. * * * The matters of wages, hours, working conditions, job security, and the like are deserving of the status of mandatory collective bargaining ; penny-a-cup increases in carryout coffee are better left to the mercies of the voluntary action of the marketplace. When the cash register stops ringing, the price of coffee will begin descending.”
In determining whether a particular matter should be deemed a subject of mandatory bargaining there should be a recognition of the legal distinction between those subjects which have a material, significant or substantial impact upon wages, hours or other conditions of employment and those which are only indirectly, incidentally or remotely related to employment conditions. The dissenting members of the Board pointed out, in effect, that equating the trifles here involved with subjects such as wages, hours, working conditions, job security, pensions, insurance, choice of bargaining representatives or other subjects directly and materially affecting “conditions of employment” is sheer nonsense.
Here, different groups of employees of Westinghouse Electric are represented by three separate unions while some are unrepresented. One of the three unions, representing only a relatively small percentage of the employees, undertakes to complain of the failure to bargain with it. We are told that the cafeteria employees of Baltimore Catering Company were granted wage increases negotiated by their bargaining representative, one of the two uncomplaining unions here, and that the increases in food prices were necessary by reason of increased operating costs.
The Board would require Westinghouse to bargain with the union at its specific request respecting the reasonableness of changes in cafeteria prices “made or to be *899made.” Just what may happen in the event the position of Westinghouse in such bargaining negotiations is unacceptable to the union is not clearly apparent. If this complaining union can force Westinghouse to engage in such bargaining the same right cannot be logically denied to the other two unions should they demand it. Voluntary and unsolicited efforts of the employer to provide facilities and services primarily for the convenience and accommodation of employees rise up to plague Westinghouse which cannot control prices and can attempt to exercise such control only by resort to the cancellation of the caterer’s contract after giving the required notice. Being placed in such an unfair and unenviable position as ordered by the Board would hardly seem to be a suitable reward for such efforts. Conceivably, enforcement of the order could lead to disagreement, dissatisfaction, strife and turmoil.
In my view, it was not the intent of Congress in enacting the National Labor Relations Act to sweep every act by every employer within the ambit of “conditions of employment.” We are reminded by the petitioner of situations and conditions which may indirectly affect the interests of employees. Bargaining representatives may argue that salaries of company officials are so high as to leave too little of company income for employees, that increases in the prices of company products will result in curtailed sales and less work for employees, that the company is spending too much or too little on research and development and is thereby jeopardizing future work opportunities or employee income, or, that the company is manufacturing products to be used in a war or shipped to a nation of which the union disapproves. To my knowledge these matters are not yet recognized as mandatory subjects for bargaining.
The Board in this case appears to follow its theory, as earlier articulated, that there is a duty imposed by Congress upon employers “to bargain collectively with their employees’ representatives with respect to any matter which might in the future emerge as a bone of contention between them, provided, of course, it should be a matter ‘in respect of rates of pay, wages, hours of employment, or other conditions of employment.’ * * * ” See Weyerhaeuser Timber Company, 87 N. L. R. B. 672, 676 (1949). A theory may be applicable in proper context but efforts to apply it to clearly inappropriate situations should be discouraged where the results are, as charged by the petitioner, absurd and mischievous. Balanced and effective collective bargaining should be the ultimate objective. The statutory purpose may best be served by formulating, adopting, and applying a reasonable concept of “conditions of employment” in determining subjects of mandatory bargaining.
Undoubtedly the caterer is interested in maintaining a profitable volume of sales, and the Westinghouse employees who avail themselves of the offered services are clearly in position to apply economic-pressures in seeking to hold prices at reasonable levels. This power is recognized by the dissenting members of the Board when they refer to “the voluntary action of the marketplace.” To borrow a portion of their concluding thrust— “when the cash register stops ringing” the silence is ominous.