Court Opinion

ID: 9459532
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-04 21:23:34.675571+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:36:12.580882
License: Public Domain

ALBERT V. BRYAN, Senior Circuit Judge
(dissenting):
With the dissenting member of the National Labor Relations Board and with the Trial Examiner, I think the dischargee, Raymond Leasure, was a supervisor within the meaning of Section 2(11) of the Act, and thus not within the employee protection of the Act’s Sections 8(a)(1) and (3).
At all events, when the Examiner reached this conclusion — at the same time recommending that the complaint be dismissed — the employer had won the case. Nevertheless, the Board and the majority of the Court penalize the employer for not taking an exception to the Examiner’s report. For me this is wholly without justification.
The penalty imposed is the refusal of the Board, and now the Court, to allow the employer even to be heard on the soundness of a hypothetical finding of the Examiner which the Board adopted as its finding. The finding second-guessed that if the Examiner was wrong about Leasure’s supervisor status, and if Leasure was only an employee, then as an employee, Leasure had been discharged for union activities. But the Examiner declined to decide that Lea-sure was an employee and explicitly concluded that “Respondent’s discharge of Raymond V. Leasure did not violate the Act”. Having prevailed in the case, the employer was not compelled to except.
Truth is no exception could logically have been interposed by the employer to the Examiner’s report. Until the Board overruled the Examiner’s finding of Leasure’s supervisor capacity, there was no decision adverse to the employer. Obviously, too, the employer had no opportunity to except to the adjudication that Leasure had been unwarrantably discharged. Until the Board’s ruling, the employer had no reason or ground for exception. Until then the employer had won and could not at that time have disagreed with the Examiner’s report.
I cannot conceive how any obligation to file an exception was put upon the employer by the General Counsel’s exception to the Examiner’s failure to make the Examiner’s speculative finding the Examiner’s decision. For this requirement, the Court cites a Board rule to the effect that, when General Counsel files exceptions to “any portion of the trial examiner’s decision”, the employer ■may (not must) file cross-exceptions. (Accent added). The employer’s omission to do so constitutes, it is said, a waiver of its right to contest the Board’s finding of the reasons for Lea-sure’s discharge.
It is unbelievable that this rule embraces a hypothetical decision. Surely an exception runs only to a decision, not to the pondering or reflection of the judicial officer upon what should be his final decision. It is particularly noteworthy that the Examiner made no “decision” on the asserted employee-violation. That he made no such decision is conclusively demonstrated by his basing his recommendation of dismissal *399solely upon the supervisor issue. That was his decision; his meditation upon what it might have been was not a decision.
Finally, at least, the circumstances were extraordinary, and, for that reason, the Board and the Court should not enforce any such rule as the Board now asserts, for the statute, 29 U.S.C.A. § 160(e) cited by the Court, excuses the failure of the employer in such circumstances to urge an objection “before the Board, its member, agent or agency”.
With deference, I conclude that the Board’s order should not be enforced because of the Board’s refusal to hear the employer on the reason for Leasure’s discharge.