Court Opinion

ID: 9478930
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 07:03:04.820713+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:46:42.593274
License: Public Domain

NICHOLS, Senior Circuit Judge,
dissenting.
Respectfully, I dissent. I agree with the court about collateral estoppel, i.e., if the parties had wanted decisions respecting different employees to be consistent, they could have taken steps to cause that to occur. It may be that antecedently they preferred to allow a possibility of inconsistency. They must have known the standard procedure produced a different arbitrator for each discharged employee, despite the close interrelationship of all the cases of the 19 removed employees — a strange way to run a railroad — but so it is.
I think the arbitrators in the Gonce and Riley cases made an over-imaginative use of the collective bargaining agreement. It does not expressly say, nor do I think it reasonably implies, that the union must request the panel of arbitrators without awaiting the outcome of settlement negotiations, or pursuit of other remedies, and within some fixed time. The likely result of a request would have been that the persons to arbitrate Gonce and Riley would have known of their selection, and they might have set their time clock running and gone to work on the cases, though settlement still seemed likely. The union made an uncontradicted showing that it would be unfeasible to try 19 cases or any substantial portion thereof simultaneously.
The union simply led Gonce and Riley into a trap for the unwary, set for them by parties more skilled than the union was in the intricate choreography of collective bargaining. The case once again shows how foolish any lay person is in these United States and this year of grace, 1989, to engage in any transaction, important and novel to him or her, without having a skilled (and expensive) lawyer at his elbow. As to the remedies Gonce and Riley may have against the union for loss caused by its obvious carelessness, cf. Karahalios v. NFFE, — U.S. -, 109 S.Ct. 1282, 103 L.Ed.2d 539 (1989).