Court Opinion

ID: 9470078
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 02:56:42.329329+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:41:43.292005
License: Public Domain

BECKER, Circuit Judge,
joins in this concurrence.
WEIS, Circuit Judge, dissenting, with whom JAMES HUNTER, III and GARTH, Circuit Judges, join.
The stated policy of the National Labor Relations Act is to protect “the exercise by workers of full freedom of association, self-organization, and designation of representatives of their own choosing.” 29 U.S.C. § 151. That freedom is best assured by secret elections, which the Board concedes is the preferable method for selecting a collective bargaining representative.
In the few instances where a fair election cannot be held, an alternative, albeit less reliable, means of ascertaining the employees’ choice of a bargaining representative is through union authorization cards. We have cautioned, however, that “[fjreedom of association and free selection of a bargaining agent ... may be substantially diminished by dependence on authorization cards.” NLRB v. K & K Gourmet Meats, 640 F.2d 460, 469 n. 4 (3d Cir.1981). The case at hand illustrates these dangers. The Board, in issuing the bargaining order, improperly relied on several authorization cards for its conclusion that the union had established majority support. The Board compounded this error by its failure to adequately examine the effect of employee turnover in the bargaining unit, as directed by this court in an earlier remand. For these two reasons, I dissent from the enforcement of the bargaining order.
I.
As the excerpts from the hearing quoted in the majority opinion demonstrate, a number of employees who signed authorization cards were told that the purpose of the card was to get an election in order to negotiate a contract. Majority Op. at 262. Of these employees, the AU found that there was no showing that Mays, Kline, and Geyer read the cards before signing them. He noted that the union organizer’s representation as to the purpose of the cards differed from the language printed on them, and that no other evidence was produced indicating that the signatures were meant to designate the union as bargaining representative. Accordingly, the ALJ held that “[t]he burden being on the General Counsel to establish that the Union represented a majority, an absence of proof that, in such circumstances, the employee read the card, *267precludes a finding that the card constitutes a designation.”
In reversing the ALJ, the Board found that the organizer’s statements were not inconsistent with the unambiguous language on the cards. It further found that “nothing in the circumstances surrounding the solicitation of the cards” indicated that the organizer “deliberately and clearly directed these employees to disregard the language on the cards, or otherwise assured them that their cards would be used for no purpose other than to get an election.” The Board did not comment on the burden of General Counsel to establish a union majority as a prerequisite for a bargaining order and commented only that , he had “established, through Murray’s testimony and the unambiguous language on the face of the authorization cards, the prima facie validity of the cards signed by Mays, Kline and Geyer.”
The Board’s conclusion that there was no inconsistency between the cards and the representations made by the union organizer is puzzling, to say the least. Its determination that General Counsel established a prima facie case of the cards’ validity is, at best, incomplete.
In NLRB v. Gissel, 395 U.S. 575, 89 S.Ct. 1918, 23 L.Ed.2d 547 (1969), the Supreme Court warned that misrepresentation in the solicitation of authorization cards was an abuse to which the Board must be alert. The Court approved the Board’s Cumberland rule that a card is valid “unless it is proved that the employee was told that the card was to be used solely for the purpose of obtaining an election.” Id. at 584, 89 S.Ct. at 1924 (emphasis in original). The Court also quoted with approval the Board’s later explanation of the Cumberland doctrine:
“The Board looks to substance rather than form. It is not the use or nonuse of certain key or ‘magic’ words that is controlling, but whether or not the totality of the circumstances surrounding the card solicitation is such, as to add up to an assurance to the card signer that his card will be used for no purpose other than to help get an election.”
395 U.S. at 608 n. 27, 89 S.Ct. at 1937 n. 27, quoting Levi Strauss & Co., 172 N.L.R.B. 732, 733 n. 7 (1968).
The Court cautioned against a “too easy mechanical application of the Cumberland rule,” 395 U.S. at 608, 89 S.Ct. at 1937, and stated that “the trial examiner’s findings in General Steel ... represent the limits of the Cumberland rule’s application. We emphasize that the Board should be careful to guard against an approach any more rigid than that in General Steel.” Id. at 608-609, 89 S.Ct. at 1937.1
In General Steel the trial examiner found authorization cards valid even though statements at odds with the unambiguous language of the card were made by a union representative. Among the findings made by the trial examiner were these:
“All of these cards were read by or to each signer thereof.... [Consideration of all the testimony pertaining to the circumstances under which the signatures were obtained convinces me that ... all these employees not only intended, but were fully aware that they were thereby designating the union as their representative.” \
General Steel Products, Inc., 157 N.L.R.B. 636, 645 (1966) (emphasis added). Thus, even though there was a variation between what appeared on the printed card and what the employees were told, the trial examiner had an evidentiary basis for finding that they were aware of these differences and chose nevertheless to sign the authorization.
No such evidence is present in this case. The ALJ who heard and saw the witnesses found specifically that there was “no showing that the card signers read the card.... [T]he evidence in those instances shows only that the employee signed a card on the *268representation that its purpose was to secure an election.” Those conclusions are compelled by any fair reading of the record. The statement that signing the card would serve to bring an election into the plant cannot be read as anything other than inconsistent with the wording on the cards which designated the union as the bargaining representative and said nothing about an election. Surely, it is obvious that designating a particular union to act as one’s representative is far different from expressing a desire for an election to deter-' mine whether a particular union is to be selected. See Burlington Industries, Inc. v. NLRB, 680 F.2d 974, 976 (4th Cir.1982).
In its decision here, the Board recognized that “[o]ne factor ... in the ‘totality of circumstances’ is whether the employees read the cards.” Even though the Board agreed that there was no evidence that the employees read the three cards, it nevertheless concluded that they were valid designations. In reaching this conclusion, the Board, in its rush to impose a bargaining order, has stretched its policy of crediting authorization cards beyond the limits which the Supreme Court drew in Gissel.
Unlike other forms of agreements recognized by the law, a variance between oral representations of a solicitor and the text of a union authorization card does not necessarily invalidate the card’s printed terms. As noted earlier, Gissel found an authorization card valid even though the solicitor stated it would be used to get an election. The Court’s rationale was that “employees should be bound by the clear language of what they sign unless that language is deliberately and clearly canceled by the union adherent with words calculated to direct the signer to disregard and forget the language above the signature.” 395 U.S. at 606, 89 S.Ct. at 1936.
This oft quoted statement of the Court points up two pertinent factors passed over by the Board. First, oral representations can vitiate the language of a card. Accordingly, the mere act of signing is not conclusive, and on a proper evidentiary record, viewed under the totality of the circumstances, a card may be declared invalid. Second, if a card may be nullified because an oral representation induced the employee to disregard the printed language, then it follows that the signer must, in the first instance, have knowledge of the text. An instruction to disregard the wording on a card can have significance only if the employee has read it.
If a person, of his own accord and uninfluenced by misrepresentation, chooses not to read a card before signing it, then the misrepresentation would be irrelevant. If, however, a person decides not to read a card on the basis of what he is told, then the text does not express the signer’s intent. See Gissel, 395 U.S. at 607, 89 S.Ct. at 1936 (employees are sufficiently sophisticated to be bound by what they sign unless expressly told act of signing represents something else). Rather, the signature represents agreement with the representations of the solicitor. Such an analysis explores the subjective motivations of the signer no more than the inquiry whether the magic words “solely” or “only” affected the signer’s decision, and thus does not offend Gissel’s admonition against probing an employee’s intent. See id. at 608, 89 S.Ct. at 1937.
The General Steel rationale leads to the conclusion that in choosing to sign a card notwithstanding misrepresentations by the solicitor, the employee indicates his willingness to abide by the text. Where, as here, no evidence demonstrates that the signer knew what was printed above his name, then there is no basis for assuming that he was agreeable to the card’s terms. In the absence of any other explanation, one must conclude, as did the AU, that the signatures were obtained solely on the misrepresentation that the card would be used to get an election. Based on undisputed evidence, the record therefore satisfied the Cumberland test.
Although General Counsel has the burden of establishing the fact of a union majority, the Board did not squarely confront this problem. It skirted the issue by stating that General Counsel had made a “prima facie [showing of] validity” through the tes*269timony of the union solicitor and the language of the cards. I will not dispute here the majority’s statement that in the usual case, General Counsel, in order to meet the burden, “need do no more than produce duly authenticated cards [unequivocally] authorizing collective bargaining.” Majority Op. at 261. The employer is then free to attack the validity of the authorization. However, General Counsel did not follow that procedure here.
As part of his case, General Counsel produced the union organizer who testified not only that the three employees signed the cards but that he made statements to them which the ALJ found inconsistent with the text. General Counsel, therefore, went beyond proof of authenticity. His witness established a variance between what was printed and what was represented, and had therefore placed the validity of the cards into contention at this stage of the proceeding. Having presented the ambiguity as part of his case, General Counsel could not rely on the mere showing of authenticity to establish a prima facie case. Nor could the Board ignore the totality of the evidence in evaluating whether General Counsel had met his burden of establishing a union majority.
Under the General Steel rationale, General Counsel could have proved his case by further testimony that the three employees had read the cards. If so, there would be evidence that, despite the inconsistency in the organizer’s statements, the employees chose to be bound by the language of the card. Absent such testimony, however, all that the record shows is that the employees signed the cards in the belief that their action could result in an election. That clearly is not proof of consent to union representation. See NLRB v. South Bay Daily Breeze, 415 F.2d 360, 366-67 (9th Cir.1969), cert. denied, 397 U.S. 915, 90 S.Ct. 919, 25 L.Ed.2d 96 (1970); L.C. Cassidy & Son, Inc. v. NLRB, 415 F.2d 1358, 1363-64 (7th Cir.1969). Nor is it the substantial evidence that the Board must have to sustain its decision in this court.
The Board’s conclusion that the evidence demonstrates a union majority is difficult to reconcile with its insistence upon “laboratory conditions” to insure freedom of choice when holding secret elections. The card process, with such admitted shortcomings as overt peer pressure, and frequent misrepresentations or misunderstandings, should require even more demanding standards than those governing elections. The Board prohibits electioneering near the polls so that employees may vote without being subjected to last minute importuning. See Season-All Industries, Inc. v. NLRB, 654 F.2d 932, 936-37 (3d Cir.1981). Yet it does not hesitate to count as a “vote” a card secured by statements that distort the meaning of what the employee is signing.
The Board’s standards are the reverse of what they should be. Proof of a majority manifested by cards should whenever possible be established by evidence at least as convincing as that demonstrated by a secret election. There were no obstacles to such proof here. It is the facts that should preclude the result reached by the Board.
II.
The Board’s failure to adequately address the effect of changes in the bargaining unit also calls into question the propriety of enforcing the bargaining order. Soon after the appeal was filed in this court in 1980, the employer moved to remand the case to the Board to adduce additional evidence. Attached to the motion was an affidavit demonstrating that significant changes in the bargaining unit had occurred in the three-year period following the May 1977 unlawful practices. The unit had grown from 29 to 33 persons, only 14 of whom were employed in May 1977. Of the 14, only 7 had signed union authorization cards. If the bargaining order had been enforced in 1980, only 7 of the 33 members of the bargaining unit would have been signatories to authorization cards. Of those seven, one is a signatory to a card I would find invalid.
The motion for remand was granted, and the Board again considered the matter. It decided to forego a hearing and accepted *270the affidavit as correct. Nevertheless, the Board declined to alter its bargaining order, remarking that “nearly half” of the current employees were with the company during the occurrence of the unfair labor practices, including the 1977 pay raise which the Board found to be unlawful. The Board added, “Respondent’s conduct remains unremedied and at no time has Respondent given assurances that such conduct will not recur.” The Board also determined that “neither the passage of time nor employee turnover in the bargaining unit has dissipated the impact of Respondent’s unfair labor practices, and therefore the possibility of erasing the effect of Respondent’s unfair labor practices and of ensuring a fair election through the use of traditional remedies remain slight.”
Since the Board refused to have a hearing which would form a basis for such findings, the only evidence in the record on which to justify them is the employer’s affidavit. But no ground for its conclusions exists in that document. The Board’s statements are simply conclusions without any supporting basis. There is not one scrap of evidence to support the assertion that a fair election could not have been held in 1980, or that an appropriate cease and desist order would not have been effective in preventing any interference with laboratory conditions.
Under analogous circumstances, Judge Frank commented in a dissenting opinion:
Reversed [on the previous appeal, the Interstate Commerce Commission] comes back to us with a report manifesting no real regard for our criticism. The Commission’s position now is that we must be satisfied if only it recites a formal abracadabra to which it has added a few words as a sop to us.78 That position I think should not satisfy this court — not at all because I consider judges inherently better than Commissioners, for I certainly do not, but because Commissioners, like judges, owe an obligation to do their job, as prescribed by statute, in a manner, which, within practical limits, publicizes the rational bases of their performance.
Old Colony Bondholders v. New York, New Haven & Hartford Railroad Co., 161 F.2d 413, 449 (2d Cir.), cert. denied sub nom., Protective Committee for Bonds of Old Colony Railroad Co. v. New York, New Haven & Hartford Railroad Co., 331 U.S. 858, 67 S.Ct. 1754, 91 L.Ed. 1865 (1947) (footnote omitted).
The Board’s action on remand was not an adequate compliance with the order issued by this court, see NLRB v. American Cable Systems, Inc., 427 F.2d 446, 448-49 (5th Cir.), cert. denied, 400 U.S. 957, 91 S.Ct. 356, 27 L.Ed.2d 266 (1970), and its bargaining order is a denial of the rights granted to the employees by the National Labor Relations Act. The Board’s desire to punish the employer has once again resulted in greater harm to the employees, the intended beneficiaries of the Act. See Electrical Products Division of Midland-Ross Co. v. NLRB, 617 F.2d 977, 991 (3d Cir.), (Weis, J., concurring and dissenting), cert. denied, 449 U.S. 871, 101 S.Ct. 210, 66 L.Ed.2d 91 (1980).
What this court said in Rapid Manufacturing Co. v. NLRB, 612 F.2d 144, 151 (3d Cir.1979), is equally applicable here:
“We would be remiss in our judicial function if, on a record as sparse as this one, we were to enforce a bargaining order which, on every count, cannot even be regarded as colorably in compliance with Gissel."
I dissent.

. The General Steel Products, Inc. case was one of four cases consolidated and decided in NLRB v. Gissel.

 Judicial review, if the Commission is correct, is as important as was the Statute of Uses which, it was said, merely “added three words to a conveyance.”