Court Opinion

ID: 9544139
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-07 16:52:23.516381+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T15:12:04.815662
License: Public Domain

CONNOR, Justice
(dissenting).
I must respectfully dissent.
I am unable to read § 4, ch. 113, SLA 1972 as imposing any definite time limit upon organized boroughs and political subdivisions in their rejection of the coverage of the Public Employment Relations Act. If the legislature had intended that municipalities should act within some definite time, it would have been a simple matter to insert such a time limitation in the text of the statute. That the legislature did not do this is, to me, significant as a guide to interpreting the statute.
Several considerations buttress the conclusion which I have reached. For one thing, many small municipalities might not have been aware of the act and the need to expressly exempt themselves from its provisions until organizational activity actually occurred. Moreover, because the act stated no definite time limit, even those municipalities which were aware of the act might not have felt any sense of urgency in acting to exempt themselves before organizational activity among their employees began to occur. In these circumstances I have difficulty reading into the act an implied time limitation within which a municipality must exempt itself from the statutory coverage.
The majority opinion places emphasis on the contrast between the 1972 statute and the earlier provision contained in AS 23.-40.010,1 which did not require the state or any political subdivisions to enter into union contracts, although the state or a political subdivision was permitted to enter into such contracts. On the contrary, it can be argued that if the political subdivisions of the state were under no previous obligation to enter into union contracts they might well read the 1972 act as continuing the *270right not to bargain collectively with labor unions, and as conferring upon the political subdivisions an indefinite time limit within which to exempt themselves should they be approached by a labor organization with a demand for collective bargaining. This might well explain why a municipality would wait until organizational activity among its employees actually occurred before acting to exempt itself from the coverage of the 1972 statute.
A quite different and more serious problem would be presented if a city had entered into a collective bargaining agreement with its employees and then later attempted to exempt itself from the coverage of the statute, but that is not the case here.
For the reasons stated I would affirm the judgment of the superior court.

. § 1, ch. 108, SLA 1959.