Court Opinion

ID: 9480395
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 07:47:01.2957+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:47:40.022606
License: Public Domain

EASTERBROOK, Circuit Judge,
concurring.
I agree with Judge Flaum that the case must be remanded to the Board, and I join his opinion except to the extent it implies that the Board may justify a bargaining order after a decade’s delay by incanting the traditional formulas. Although the Board is entitled to a chance to focus on this issue, coming up with an explanation adequate to support a bargaining order will be a tall order.
A bargaining order is reserved for unusual cases, NLRB v. Gissel Packing Co., *1161395 U.S. 575, 610-15, 89 S.Ct. 1918, 1938-41, 23 L.Ed.2d 547 (1969), not because courts ought to save employers from the deserts of their illegal behavior but because § 7 of the NLRA provides that employees’ choice of bargaining representative or no representative is conclusive. A bargaining order may thwart the current employees’ preferences. Although the people who work at the Pharr store in 1990 might want Local 455 of the Food Workers Union to represent them, we don’t know this. They might want some other union, or no union. Local 455 might not want them (a possibility suggested by its failure to intervene in support of the Board’s order or file an amicus brief). A bargaining order today based on events a decade ago may defeat all contemporary interests.
Such a step may be justified if achievement of today’s desires will be frustrated no matter what — by a bargaining order if the employees don't want a union, or by inability to exercise free choice if they do. If the unfair labor practices would prevent a reliable election even today, or if the employer is likely to spoil a new election and again frustrate free choice, and if the card majority remains the best information about employees’ preferences, then a bargaining order makes the best of an impossible situation.
Passage of time, and removal of the persons within the firm responsible for the violation, affect these things. At oral argument counsel for the Board conceded that had Local 455 been put in place in 1982, immediately after the administrative law judge’s order, it could have been voted out in 1983 after the one-year bar. What the Board has never explained — in this case or any other — is how the passage of a single year with the union “in” means that the employees’ later votes represent free choice, while the passage of a much greater period with the union “out” has no such effect. Maybe the presence of a union assures the employees that they are safe in collective action; maybe not. Suppose a union had been recognized at Pharr in 1982 and that Montgomery Ward had refused to sign a collective bargaining agreement (as it would be entitled to do, after good-faith bargaining). By 1983 all the employees would have learned is the futility of joint action, yet the Board would allow the union to be voted out. Inconsistencies of this kind require explanation, which has never been supplied.
Even more fundamental is the question: “When are employees unable to express free choice in an election?” At the time of Gissel the Board was of opinion that employees are so timorous that only “laboratory conditions” would allow them to exercise free choice. Hollywood Ceramics Co., 140 N.L.R.B. 221 (1962); Gummed Products Co., 112 N.L.R.B. 1092 (1955). The NLRB had an (implicit) picture of an employee whose decision to sign an authorization card under the watchful stare of a union organizer presumptively represents free choice, yet so befuddled by propaganda that even in the secrecy of the voting booth he would be too scared or baffled to vote freely. If employees are indeed such wee, tim’rous beasties, then elections are pointless and the Board should be deciding for employees, as it does when it issues a bargaining order.
Since Gissel the Board has abandoned this view of employees in light of research disclosing that (a) electioneering does not have much effect (most employees’ minds are made up before the campaign); (b) unfair labor practices during the campaign, far from causing the employees to vote against the union, cause them to appreciate that they need a union, and consequently improve the union’s chance of winning in a secret ballot. Julius G. Getman, Stephen B. Goldberg & Jeanne B. Herman, Union Representation Elections: Law and Reality (1976). In Shopping Kart Food Market, Inc., 228 N.L.R.B. 1311 (1977), the Board, citing this research, threw over its old “laboratory conditions” doctrine and adopted a view that only fraud or egregious practices spoil a vote. Shopping Kart was overruled in General Knit of California, Inc., 239 N.L.R.B. 619 (1978), which was overruled in turn by Midland National Life Insurance Co., 263 N.L.R.B. 127 (1982). Prevailing doctrine has it that employees are rather hardy, so that the *1162results of elections usually stand despite imperfections that would have led to reruns or bargaining orders in earlier years.
All the more curious, given this revision of the rules for when the Board throws out the results of an election, that the Board has never changed its view that once an election is thrown out, a bargaining order is appropriate because employees are easily confused and dissuaded from supporting the union. The Board has two models of employee: one that it uses when deciding when to accept the results of an election, and another that it uses when deciding whether a new election would give effect to the employees’ preferences. It has never explained this disparity, despite being criticized for it. NLRB v. Village IX, Inc., 723 F.2d 1360, 1369-73 (7th Cir.1983) (collecting critics); Note, The Gissel Bargaining Order, the NLRB, and the Courts of Appeals: Should the Supreme Court Take a Second Look?, 32 S.C. L.Rev. 399 (1980).
This convenient inconsistency may be responsible for. the increasing unwillingness of courts to defer to the Board’s say-so that a new election could not be effective. Our opinion in Impact Industries, Inc. v. NLRB, 847 F.2d 379 (7th Cir.1988), threw a case back to the Board, which decided that a bargaining order wasn’t necessary after all, 293 N.L.R.B. No. 99 (1989). Other opinions stopped the contest without a remand. Village IX, one of the no-remand group, pointedly remarks on the Board’s inability or unwillingness to explain why it issues bargaining orders, an inability that may be attributable to its inconsistent assumptions about employees’ psyches. See also, e.g., First Lakewood Associates v. NLRB, 582 F.2d 416 (7th Cir.1978); Peerless of America, Inc. v. NLRB, 484 F.2d 1108 (7th Cir.1973). Decisions from other circuits include NLRB v. Knogo Corp., 727 F.2d 55, 60-61 (2d Cir.1984) (serious unfair labor practices; no enforcement given 4 year delay and 60% turnover); NLRB v. Pace Oldsmobile, Inc., 739 F.2d 108 (2d Cir.1984) (serious unfair labor practices; no enforcement given 4V2 year delay and 50% turnover); NLRB v. Jamaica Towing Co., 632 F.2d 208, 216 (2d Cir.1980) (moderate unfair labor practices; no enforcement given 5 year delay and 38% turnover); NLRB v. Apple Tree Chevrolet, Inc., 671 F.2d 838, 841-42 (4th Cir.1982) (moderate violations; no enforcement given 4V2 year delay and 75% turnover); NLRB v. Pilgrim Foods, Inc., 591 F.2d 110, 120 (1st Cir.1978) (moderate violations; no enforcement given 3 year delay and turnover among labor and management). There are many similar cases. Individually and collectively, they have done nothing to induce the Board to give reasons or reconcile its approaches.
In exercising its Gissel power, the Board ought to do what a district judge does when issuing an injunction: determine what remedy is necessary as of the time the order issues, taking into account both the likelihood of error and the costs of false positives and false negatives. American Hospital Supply Corp. v. Hospital Products Ltd., 780 F.2d 589, 593-94 (7th Cir.1986); Lawson Products, Inc. v. Avnet, Inc., 782 F.2d 1429, 1433-34 (7th Cir.1986). A reasoned decision holds to a minimum the sum of these error costs. So far the Board has not done this (thus we can’t enforce its order). It is hard to see how the Board could conclude that the bargaining order is likely to produce the least costs. Our case is at the far end of the scale, with a decade’s delay, 85% turnover among employees and 95% turnover among managers. The chance that what happened 10 years ago would prevent a new group of employees from holding a good election today is vanishingly small. So even if an error in thinking that a new election could yield a valid choice is a graver mistake than an error in believing that the “real” choice in 1980 was the union, a new election here yields the least net costs of error. I can’t imagine how the Board could justify a bargaining order unless it is prepared to overrule Midland and restore the old “laboratory conditions” view of employees as ninnies.
Especially not given the ratio of cards to votes. According to the Getman study (the basis of the Board’s decision in Shopping Kart), on average 18% of those who sign authorization cards do not want the union. They sign because they want to mollify *1163their friends who are soliciting, because they think the cards will get them dues waivers in the event the union should prevail, and so on. On average, then, we expect to see — and do see — substantial slippage between the cards and the votes in a simon-pure election. When unions get between 50% and 70% of the cards, they win only 48% of the elections. See Village IX, 723 F.2d at 1371.
Local 455 collected 145 authorization cards at Pharr out of 283 employees, or 51.2%. When election day came, 270 employees were eligible to vote. The union got 121 votes, the employer 132; there were 8 challenged ballots. So the union’s support shrank from 51.2% of card signers to 47.8% of the votes (excluding the 8 contested ballots). Measured as a ratio of votes to cards it comes out at .834, a shrinkage of 16.6%, less slippage than is expected in the normal campaign. Far from demonstrating that the employer’s practices should be expected to have an irreparable effect 10 years later, this ordinary drop suggests that there was insufficient reason to set the election aside in the first place — for, as usual, employees are hardier than the Board lets on.
No other case of which I am aware ended in a bargaining order after a paltry decline between the card majority and the election. Combine that with a 10 year delay, 85% turnover among employees, and 95% turnover among managers, and it is hard to see what the Board could say on remand, short of a wholesale reexamination of its assumptions. All that could be left is a desire to punish the employer, and “to give the employees a collective bargaining representative that they do not want, as a way of punishing their employer for committing unfair labor practices, is so discordant with the basic philosophy of the Act” that it should not be done. Village IX, 723 F.2d at 1370. See also NLRB v. Skip Shape Maintenance Co., 474 F.2d 434, 444 (D.C.Cir.1972).