Court Opinion

ID: 8937745
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2022-11-27 07:40:00.223098+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:09:39.900085
License: Public Domain

REINHARDT, Circuit Judge,
concurring:
I agree that the opinion Judge Hall has authored for the court correctly applies the law as it has evolved in judiciál decisions. Accordingly, I join in that opinion. I write separately only to point out that the rule we follow has the practical effect, in almost every instance, of precluding union members from recovering against their unions in cases of this kind. We hold here, as courts have previously held, that a union member can establish liability only if he can show that had the strike continued, the employer would have acceded to the union’s requests. This is a fact that is ordinarily simply not susceptible of objective proof. In this case, counsel for plaintiffs frankly acknowledged he would be unable to offer such proof. In other cases it is possible that less forthright counsel may submit affidavits that will enable their clients to survive summary judgment. The end result in any such case, however, would in all likelihood be a wholly unwarranted trial followed by a verdict for the defendant.
The most persuasive evidence as to what the employer might have done had a union continued to engage in a strike would be the employer’s own testimony. Thus, our test seemingly puts it within the power of employers who have survived a bitter strike to punish the unions that called it. However, I suspect that generally employers will, for a variety of reasons, be unwilling to testify that they were prepared to offer their employees a more favorable contract than the one they agreed to.
Determining what would have happened had a strike continued is far different from determining what would have occurred had a matter been submitted to arbitration, or even what the result of good faith bargaining might have been. The consequences of an arbitrary or discriminatory failure to submit a case to arbitration should be determined in a manner similar to that used in a malpractice case in which an attorney has failed to file a suit within the period prescribed by the statute of limitations: an objective evaluation is made as to the merits of the claim and its probable outcome. A make-whole remedy in a failure-to-bargain case is arrived at by determining what other comparable employers in the area have agreed to do following good-faith bargaining. (See Martori Bros. Distributors v. James-Massengale, 781 F.2d 1349 (9th Cir.1986), for description of the specific method used under California Agricultural Labor Relations Act.) However, it will almost always be far too speculative to attempt to show that an employer who has agreed to a particular collective bargaining agreement following a strike would have granted one or more specific additional benefits had the strike continued for a while longer. In short, the rule that union members must prove that a continuation of the strike would have resulted in an improved contract defies practicality and makes little sense in the every day world of labor relations.
I hasten to add that I think that a rule that makes breach of the duty of fair representation suits impractical in cases of the type before us achieves a desirable result. Were I free to decide what the law should be, I would simply not permit suits against union officials by union members dissatisfied with their officers’ conduct in negotiating collective bargaining agreements. Judge Hall’s opinion, properly applying precedent, achieves that same result indirectly, by placing an impossible causation barrier in the way of ’such actions. In my view, the union’s own election and removal process provides the proper vehicle for addressing complaints like the plaintiffs’, Negotiating labor contracts is difficult enough in these times without the additional threat of lawsuits from unhappy union members, with the attendant possibility of personal liability. Today’s labor contracts no longer are automatic vehicles for gains *1400by individual workers. Now, contracts containing cutbacks or reductions in benefits are far from infrequent. Dissatisfaction over the contents of a labor agreement is too easily transformed into a suit over the union official’s performance.
It is true that the extreme case, a deliberate lie by a union officer regarding the contents of the agreement negotiated, is a sympathetic one for permitting litigation. However, there is a simple method of eliminating the possibility of any such occurrence. It is within the power of union members to require, in the union’s by-laws or otherwise, that contracts be submitted to a vote only after the proposed changes have been reduced to writing and furnished to the membership. Such a rule would avoid the type of problem that allegedly arose here; it would not, however, result in any significant delay in the ratification process.
In any event, I agree that, under the current state of the law, Judge Hall’s opinion, in which I fully join, states the applicable rule correctly.