Court Opinion

ID: 9462667
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-04 22:46:45.012579+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:37:42.433779
License: Public Domain

LEVIN H. CAMPBELL,
Circuit Judge (dissenting).
My views are generally similar to those of the dissenting member of the Board and of Judge Pell who dissented in Zim’s Foodliner, Inc. v. NLRB, 495 F.2d 1131, 1144 (7th Cir. 1975). The court in Zim’s held in a comprehensive opinion that the purchasers of several markets from a nationwide supermarket chain had a duty to bargain with former employee representatives. Judge Pell took the view, however, that changes in size and operational methods of the new employers made it unreasonable to presume that the old union still represented a majority of employees within the greatly diminished bargaining units.
Here, Band-Age employs only about one-seventh the workforce and about one-third of the floorspace that Paulis Silk employed when the latter was at full capacity. BandAge has fewer than one-half of Paulis Silk’s job classifications, produces a single product, and sells to a markedly different and more restricted clientele. Moreover, unlike the situation that obtained in NLRB v. Burns Security Services, 406 U.S. 272, 92 S.Ct. 1571, 32 L.Ed.2d 61 (1971), the Paulis Silk employees did not elect the Union on the eve of the change in employers. Rather the Union’s status as bargaining agent dates back (as Judge Pell wrote in Zim’s, supra) to “ancient history”. Selection of the Union occurred many years ago at a time when Paulis Silk was presumably op*7erating with its full complement of 250 or 300 employees. How many, if any, of the Band-Age employees who once worked for Paulis Silk ever actually voted for the Union is unknown. Indeed, it is not known that an election was ever held. And the last contract negotiated between Paulis Silk and the Union was written to terminate in December, 1973, and provided for severance pay, reflecting the expectation that Paulis Silk would cease operations in December, 1973, thus ending that chapter of industrial relations.
Under these circumstances, I find it too speculative to adopt as a “presumption” that when Band-Age commenced operations nearly a month after Paulis Silk ceased, a majority of its employees desired or even anticipated representation by the Union. To be sure, nearly all of them had worked at Paulis Silk and had been members of the Union as required by the collective bargaining agreément. But given a new employer, a different business, and a more intimate unit, it is perfectly possible that the employees had no desire to reestablish the Union in its former role.
The premise of the National Labor Relations Act is industrial democracy, requiring an employer to bargain with the representative of a majority of its employees. This democratic principle must, of course, yield to practicality and the need for industrial peace, as rules limiting the frequency of elections illustrate. See e.g., Brooks v. NLRB, 348 U.S. 96, 75 S.Ct. 176, 99 L.Ed. 125 (1954). But such rules, presuming the continuity of majority sentiment, evolved within the frame of a single enterprise. While they may be appropriately extended to genuine successor entities, they should not apply where the original bargaining unit and nature of the enterprise have been radically altered. I fear that the enlargement of the successorship doctrine to accommodate such a case may sweep aside the requirement that the Union have roots in the actual wishes of the employees. Cf. International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union, AFL-CIO v. NLRB, 366 U.S. 731, 81 S.Ct. 1603, 6 L.Ed.2d 762 (1961). Here it would be simple to require an expression of the wishes of the 37 current employees rather than to presume, somewhat woodenly, that the earlier-expressed wishes of a different group of employees working for a different employer remain effective.