Court Opinion

ID: 9714206
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-26 05:33:07.4819+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:23:24.407391
License: Public Domain

Blaik Moody, Jk., J.
(concurring in the result). I concur in the result reached by Justice Williams. While the Oakland County Prosecuting Attorney’s investigators may function in some ways as "policemen”, I do not think that the Legislature intended that these investigators should be included under the mantle of Act 312. Because the intent of the Legislature is dispositive in the present case, no view is taken as to whether a person who functions as a "policeman” but is not a member of a "police department” as such may be or was intended to be included among those protected by Act 312. There may be persons that the Legislature clearly intended to protect by the enactment of Act 312, who would not be afforded protection if the act were given too "strict” or "literal” an interpretation.
Levin, J.
(to affirm). Act 3121 provides that when mediation of "a public police or fire department employee’s dispute” over the terms of a new contract reaches impasse, either party may request that the dispute be resolved through compulsory, binding arbitration proceedings before a tripartite arbitration panel.2 The issue presented is whether a collective bargaining impasse between Oakland County and 17 investigators employed by the Oakland County Prosecutor and represented by a dis*339tinct bargaining unit affiliated with Council 23 is a dispute within the intendment of the act.
The Michigan Employment Relations Commission found that the investigators met the statutory definition because they were "subject to the hazards” of police work, and that factual finding is not challenged on appeal.
Our colleague would confine the operation of the act by reading into it a requirement that the employees and the employer both have "critical-service status” and would find that the investigators do not satisfy the proposed requirement.
We would not introduce such a requirement. While Act 312 aims to provide a means of averting critical-service work stoppages by police officers and fire fighters, the act by its terms covers persons "subject to the hazards” of police work and fire fighting without inquiry whether a work stoppage by those persons would threaten community safety. We would affirm the MERC3 and the Court of Appeals,4 which held that these investigators are within the scope of Act 312 and therefore this bargaining impasse should be resolved through arbitration.
I
Our colleague would hold that the compulsory, binding arbitration proceedings provided by Act 312 to resolve collective bargaining impasses between employees of public police and fire departments and their department employers may be invoked "only when both the complaining employee and the interested department/employer *340enjoy critical-service status”. He writes that it is not consistent with the policy of the act to permit resolution of a collective bargaining impasse through arbitration unless "the particular complainant employee [is] subject to the hazards of police work” and the "interested department/employer [is] a critical-service * * * department * * * having as its principal function the promotion of the public safety, order and welfare so that a work stoppage in that department would threaten community safety”.
It is asserted that the act should be so construed, in accordance with its "spirit” rather than its "letter”, because an inherent ambiguity "regarding eligibility to invoke its intended coverage” "admits of three differing interpretations”, two of which must be rejected as inconsistent with the act’s "manifest intent” "to avert critical-service work stoppages”.
We perceive no reason to add a gloss to the act which would limit its application to law-enforcement or fire-fighting personnel who provide "critical” services in "critical-service departments”.
It is unnecessary to the disposition of this case to consider what might be the proper resolution of a case in which it was claimed that, simply because some of a county or city department’s employees were "subject to the hazards of police work”, all employees of that department were subject to arbitration of collective bargaining impasses under Act 312 irrespective of whether their positions exposed them to those hazards. No party to this case has urged such a construction of the act.
The appearance of ambiguity is magnified by the evocation of a hypothetical county library, all of whose employees are held subject to the act be*341cause it employs two persons in a capacity subject to the hazards of police work. The proposed solution, like the accompanying delineation of the problem, is unnecessarily sweeping. While the language of Act 312 is not entirely free from ambiguity, less restrictive approaches to its application are not foreclosed.
The question in the instant case is not whether employees who are neither policemen nor subject to the hazards of police work come within the act, but whether employees who are subject to the hazards of police work, although neither titled "policemen” nor employed by an agency called a police department, are subject to its provisions.
II
Our reading of the act discloses no reason to suppose that the Legislature did not intend its coverage to extend to all persons "subject to the hazards” of police work without regard to whether employed in "critical-service” capacities.
According to its title, Act 312 "provide[s] for compulsory arbitration of labor disputes in municipal police and fire departments” and "define[s] such public departments * * *”. Section 1 of the act declares that in "public police and fire departments” "[i]t is the public policy of this state * * * to afford an alternate, expeditious, effective and binding procedure for the resolution of disputes, and to that end the provisions of this act, providing for compulsory arbitration, shall be liberally construed”.5
"[P]ublic police and fire departments” are defined by § 2(1) as:
*342"[A]ny department of a city, county, village, or township having employees engaged as policemen, or in fire fighting or subject to the hazards thereof, emergency medical service personnel employed by a police or fire department, or an emergency telephone operator employed by a police or fire department.”6
Section 3 declares that either the employees or the employer may initiate binding arbitration of a "public police or fire department employee's dispute” which remains unresolved 30 days after its submission to mediation.7 (Emphasis supplied.) Whether or not § 3 encompasses disputes involving employees of a department of local government who are not themselves "engaged as policemen * * * or subject to the hazards thereof’, it can properly be understood as authorizing employees so engaged or their employer to initiate binding arbitration proceedings, for it is the presence of those employees which renders the department/ employer a "public police and fire department” within the meaning of the act.
One can agree that the primary motivation for the passage of Act 312 was to forestall police and fire fighter work stoppages which might threaten community safety without conceding that the Legislature intended to limit the act’s reach to cases where "both the complaining employee and the interested department/employer enjoy critical-service status”. The Legislature has not used the word "critical” or any similar term in identifying *343the departments or employees within the scope of Act 312 or in any other provision of the act. For whatever reasons, the Legislature elected not to define the class of disputes covered by the act in terms of the urgency of the services at stake or the potential threat that their interruption would pose to the community. It may have determined that such a standard would be too difficult to apply, or it may have simply decided that all police officers, fire fighters, or other persons subject to the same hazards in their jobs, should be covered regardless of their precise occupational classifications.
To permit the prosecutor’s investigators or the county to initiate arbitration proceedings to resolve their collective bargaining impasse would not "defeat the act’s purpose and intent” or be inconsistent with its "spirit”.8 To hold Act 312 applicable in this case does not lead to "a manifest contradiction of the apparent purpose of the enactment, or to some inconvenience or absurdity, hardship or injustice, presumably not intended”. It is not manifestly absurd or incredible to suppose that the Legislature intended employees in the position of these prosecutor’s investigators to come within the scope of the act. Indeed, the inclusion of the words "or subject to the hazards thereof’ in § 2(1) *344indicates that the Legislature did not intend to confine the act’s coverage to police officers or fire fighters.
III
It appears from our colleague’s opinion that the gloss to be applied would cover all clauses of definitional §2(1), regardless of whether the involved employees are nominally police officers or fire fighters or bear other occupational titles, or whether the involved departments are police or fire departments within the ordinary meaning of those terms or other governmental agencies.
We discern no indication in the act that the Legislature considered some police officers more important than others or regarded some departments as more indispensable than others. But the proposed analysis suggests that among the ranks of an ordinary police or fire department, some officers (e.g., those in charge of files, fingerprints and storage of evidence) might not meet the definition for arbitration along with their fellow officers. Moreover, the analysis leads either to the conclusion that the officers from municipal police departments who worked side-by-side with Oakland County Prosecutor’s investigators on such assignments as gambling raids, narcotics surveillance and "buys”, and the special child homicide task force, are not within the intendment of the act, or to the conclusion that those officers are subject to arbitration while the investigators are not solely because of departmental affiliation, although the act draws no distinctions between "public police and fire departments” meeting the § 2(1) definition.
IV
It does not appear that the proposed limiting *345gloss on the act received consideration from the MERC in this case.9 We are without the benefit of its assessment of the suitability of such a construction and the practical advantages or difficulties that its adoption might engender. Before adopting such a construction, we should, at minimum, remand the cause to the MERC, whose perspective for gauging the impact of such a construction upon the operation of the act is superior to ours.10
In sum, we find no need to apply a broad gloss to the act to deal with hypothetical situations not presently before us. We would approve the determination of the MERC, well-grounded in the language of the act, that these investigators, whose positions involve them in law enforcement and subject them to the hazards faced by police officers, fall within the scope of Act 312. We would therefore affirm the judgment of the Court of Appeals.
Kavanagh, J., concurred with Levin, J.

 1969 PA 312, MCL 423.231 et seq.; MSA 17.455(31) et seq.

 While I adhere to the view expressed in dissent that Act 312 is unconstitutional, a majority of the Court has held that the act is constitutional. Detroit v Detroit Police Officers Ass'n, 408 Mich 410; 294 NW2d 68 (1980).

 Oakland County (Prosecutor’s Investigators), 1978 MERC Lab Op 328.

 In the Matter of the Petition of Metropolitan Council 23, AFSCME, 89 Mich App 564; 280 NW2d 600 (1979).

 MCL 423.231; MSA 17.455(31).

 MCL 423.232(1); MSA 17.455(32)(1).
The clause including emergency telephone operators was added by 1977 PA 303 while this case was pending before the MERC.
If all employees of police and lire departments were intended to fall within the act, there would have been no need to make separate provision for emergency medical service personnel and emergency telephone operators "employed by police or fire departments”.

 MCL 423.233; MSA 17.455(33), as amended by 1977 PA 303.

 Our colleague stresses that "a thing which is within the spirit of a statute is within the statute, although not within the letter; and a thing within the letter is not within the statute, unless within the intention.” Common Council of Detroit v Rush, 82 Mich 532, 542; 46 NW 951 (1890). But this maxim is quoted from a case in which this Court held that it would not be inconsistent with the spirit of an elections law providing for private voting booths and other safeguards of the secrecy of the ballot to allow blind and crippled voters to receive assistance outside the polling places in the preparation of their ballots, although no such provision was made in the act. Including these prosecutor’s investigators within the ambit of an act whose terms appear to embrace them is a far cry from excluding otherwise qualified voters from the franchise merely because a general statute failed to make provision for physical inability to comply with its requirements.

 The county’s original response to a request from the MERC to "clarify the duties of the investigators” to facilitate "a determination * * * as to their eligibility for arbitration under Act 312” stressed that the investigators’ "activities are not critical to the immediate day-to-day operation of protecting the public and their recognition as eligible for Act 312 compulsory arbitration would be inconsistent with the intentions of the act”. The county’s lawyer adverted to this argument in his opening statement before the MERC hearing officer. However, this argument was not further mentioned either in the county’s post-hearing brief or in the MERC’s decision and order.

 The MERC has previously endorsed the view stated by the Court of Appeals in Lincoln Park Detention Officers v Lincoln Park, 76 Mich App 358, 365; 256 NW2d 593 (1977), that Act 312 covers employees "engaged as police officers or fire fighters or subject to the hazards thereof’.