Court Opinion

ID: 9462145
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-04 22:33:03.411944+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:37:25.632951
License: Public Domain

WYZANSKI, District Judge
(dissenting in part):
My reading of N.L.R.B. v. Katz, 369 U.S. 736, 82 S.Ct. 1107, 8 L.Ed.2d 230 (1962) differs from the interpretation of that authority by the master in this case, District Judge Blumenfeld, and by my brethren in this panel, Circuit Judges Lumbard and Timbers, and perhaps earlier by the majority of the panel which decided N.L.R.B. v. Patent Trader, 415 F.2d 190 (2d Cir. 1969).
Under my view of Katz, an administrative agency, a master, or a court when ascertaining and finding the facts must focus upon the issue whether the employer took unilateral action to change conditions of employment about which the union representing his employees was seeking to negotiate. If the employer takes action of that character, he violates § 8(a)(5) of the NLR Act. See p. 743 of 369 U.S., 82 S.Ct. 1107, in N.L.R.B. v. Katz, supra.
It does not seem to me permissible to make an exception to the Katz rule in a situation where the admitted changes made by the employer were of the character disclosed in this record. When the employer in the case at bar revised the wage floor of 39 old employees and set wage floors for new employees, he was not merely applying an established practice, crystallized into clear formulae, for the purpose of covering new situations as they developed currently.
The employer, the union, the workers all knew that the employer had no established formulae. He was dispensing bounty in a way certain to undermine the prestige of the union and to make him appear as the benevolent source of benefits. Were this inference doubtful— which it is not — it would be made certain by the history of this employer’s earlier actions in this very case which were condemned by the N.L.R.B. and which led to this court’s order which it is now alleged has been contumaciously defied. What the employees and the union claim to have been actions of the employer undermining both the union’s statutory bargaining rights and this court’s judicial order seems to me to have been clearly proven and to warrant full enforcement of the N.L.R.B.’s petition to adjudicate the employer in contempt.