Court Opinion

ID: 9454221
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-04 18:39:45.974439+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:34:01.346726
License: Public Domain

BLACKMUN, Circuit Judge,
dissenting in part.
I am troubled by, and dissent from, the court’s enforcement of that portion of the Board’s order relating to a § 8(a) (1) violation in the polling of the employees. In so doing I am not to be understood as disapproving of the conditions which Strucksnes Constr. Co., 165 NLRB No. 102 (1967), imposes. It merely seems to me that we can view too stringently and too formally the third requirement relating to assurances against reprisal. Certainly the actual utterance of words of assurance, spoken or written, but hollow, would be no genuine assurance at all, and, just as certainly, ought not then to satisfy the third requirement. In contrast, I feel that the satisfaction of the assurance requirement is to be found in the totality of the circumstances. The four other requirements of Struksnes, the majority holds, are all clearly satisfied here. I agree. However, with those four requirements so satisfied; with the poll fairly and carefully conducted; with the person in sole charge of that poll a man who was concededly neutral, who was well respected in the community, and (as he testified for the general counsel) who knew most of the employees by name; with Mr. Berggren not a member of Mr. Whitney’s parish; with three employees selected by Mr. Whitney distributing and counting the ballots; and with the poll taken with no management or supervisory personnel present, I am convinced, as was one member of the Board’s panel, that assurances against reprisal are inherent and present in the very situation. To require, as a condition of avoiding being guilty of an unfair labor practice, that Mr. Berggren or Mr. Whitney specifically announce, in so many words, that the employees are then and there assured that there will be no reprisals, is for me somewhat unrealistic. NLRB v. Heck’s Inc., 387 F.2d 65 (4 Cir. 1967), the case primarily urged upon us by the Board on this issue, provides no factual precedent. It appears, from that opinion, that the poll there was conducted by company representatives and that the answers were given to company interrogators.
On the discharge issue I am in agreement with the majority.