Court Opinion

ID: 9723136
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-26 10:03:24.059248+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:24:45.055772
License: Public Domain

SIMONETT, Justice
(concurring in part, dissenting in part).
I agree with Parts II and IV of the court’s opinion. I agree with the result reached in Part III but not with the reasoning. In my opinion, arbitrability is a nonis-sue.
The Federation consists of police officers employed at the airport who are classified as essential employees. Clerks and dispatchers in the communications center are in a separate bargaining unit. So are police supervisors. Over the years, police officers have performed intermittent dispatching work when a dispatcher would be temporarily unavailable. During the period from November 1984 to mid-May 1985, the employer greatly reduced the amount of, substitute dispatching work that the police officers had been doing, apparently assigning it to others. The Federation grieved this work reassignment.
The key provision in the Federation’s contract applicable to this grievance is Section 7.81:
It is the intent of the EMPLOYER to provide employees in the bargaining unit the first opportunity for all law enforcement work normally performed by employees in the bargaining unit * * *.
The arbitrator had to decide, therefore, if the substitute dispatching work was “law enforcement work normally performed” by Federation police officers. After 5 days of testimony, the arbitrator made detailed findings, carefully set out his reasons, and denied the grievance. He expressly determined that the substitute dispatching work “is not law enforcement work normally performed by members of the unit within the meaning of Section 7.81 of the Agreement.”
This should have ended the matter. This was the issue submitted by the parties for arbitration and the decision for which they had bargained. It was obviously within the *526arbitrator’s authority to interpret Section 7.81 of the parties’ collective bargaining agreement and to apply that section, as interpreted, to the facts of the case.
The case was unnecessarily complicated, however, when the Airports Commission also argued at the arbitration hearing that the matter "is simply not arbitrable.” Apparently the Commission contended that the job classification of dispatcher had been placed in another bargaining unit and that police clerks and police supervisors, who were in different units, were being assigned substitute dispatching. These were facts, of course, for the arbitrator to consider in applying Section 7.81 of the Federation’s contract, but these facts did not oust the arbitrator of jurisdiction to hear the Federation’s grievance.
Nevertheless, in view of the arguments raised, the arbitrator, after finding that Section 7.81 did not entitle the police officers to dispatching work, went on to say as an alternative basis for his decision that “the issue is not arbitrable.”1 The arbitrator reasoned that the scheduling of employees in a unit to work “out of classification” in another unit for small, sporadic amounts of time was an exercise of the employer’s inherent managerial rights. Seizing on this language, the Federation argues that the arbitrator ruled Section 7.81 unenforceable and, therefore, never decided the grievance on the merits.
The issue of whether or not the Airports Commission has an inherent managerial right not to assign police officers to substitute dispatching is not at issue here. This is grievance arbitration, not contract negotiation. The arbitrator is deciding what the language in an existing contract means, not what language should go into a contract which is in the process of being negotiated.2 Here the parties had an agreement covering extra outside work, which provided that police officers would have first opportunity “for all law enforcement work normally performed by employees in the bargaining unit.” Whatever the employer’s inherent managerial rights might be, this is what the employer agreed to as its contractual obligation, and if this constituted yielding up some managerial peroga-tives, it made the contract clause no less arbitrable. If the arbitrator had decided that Section 7.81 gave Federation members preference for substitute dispatching work, the Airports Commission would have been liable for breach of its agreement. The arbitrator, however, ruled otherwise. This was the matter at issue and the arbitrator decided it.
In other words, even if the arbitrator’s alternative reasoning was faulty, his decision applying Section 7.81 to the facts of the case was within his authority and must be sustained. Arbitrability is a jurisdictional concept. See State v. Berthiaume, 259 N.W.2d 904, 910 (Minn.1977). A grievance is arbitrable if the arbitrator has the power to decide the grievance. The arbitrator’s power to decide is conferred by the contracting parties and is defined in the agreement to arbitrate. In this case, for example, the agreement provided “[t]he decision shall be based solely upon the arbitrator’s interpretation of the meaning of application of the Agreement and the facts of the grievance presented.”
Part of the confusion in this case apparently arises from the discussion of arbitra-bility in Cloquet Education Ass’n v. Independent School Dist. No. 94, 344 N.W.2d 416 (Minn.1984). There the union objected to the school district unilaterally assigning teachers to chaperone dances. The school *527district refused to arbitrate the teachers grievance, claiming this assignment was an inherent managerial right. The contract, however, provided that out-of-class activities should be assigned in accordance with past practice. This court ordered grievance arbitration. But in so doing, the court said it first had to decide if out-of-class unilateral assignments were an inherent managerial right. (The court decided they were not.) Id. at 418. In other words, the court seemed to be saying that only if a matter is “bargainable,” is it “grievable” and, therefore, “arbitrable.” This is what the arbitrator in the instant case thought the court was saying. Bargainability, however, has nothing to do with arbitrability here, and, in my opinion, the language in Cloquet which gives that impression is misleading and leads to the kind of confusion we have in this case. See id. at 419 (Peterson, J., Simonett, J., and Kelley, J., concurring). There was no need in Cloquet to determine what was an inherent managerial right. The parties had an agreement on extra-duty assignments and construing that contractual obligation was a proper matter for arbitration.
What is “bargainable” is a matter for contract negotiations. Some managerial rights are prohibited by statute from being bargained away. See, e.g., Minn.Stat. § 179A.07, subd. 1 (1988) (selection of supervisory employees). For other inherent managerial rights, an employer may (or may not) refuse to negotiate. See Minn. Stat. § 179A.07, subd. 1 (1988). But once a bargain is made, and even if the employer may have yielded on some inherent managerial right, disputes arising under the agreement are resolved by grievance arbitration, i.e., the disputes are arbitrable to the extent the parties’ arbitration clause so provides.

. The arbitrator’s decision states: "Since as a matter of contract interpretation the grievance must be denied, the other issues raised by the parties are technically moot and need not be addressed." The arbitrator further stated, however, that "in anticipation of the possibility of judicial review," he would also discuss the question of arbitrability raised by the employer.

. Interestingly, as the arbitrator noted, the Federation collective bargaining agreement originally had a much broader job 'preference provision. At one time, the agreement provided that members of the Federation would have preference for “law enforcement work normally performed by employer." (Emphasis added.) The current provision, limiting preference to “law enforcement work normally performed by employees in the bargaining unit” (emphasis added), was inserted by a previous arbitrator during interest arbitration.