Continental Web Press, Inc. v. N.L.R.B.

• Decision Date: 30 August 1984
• Docket Number: 83-2422,P,AFL-CI,Nos. 83-2124,s. 83-2124
• Citation: 742 F.2d 1087
• Parties: 117 L.R.R.M. (BNA) 2145, 101 Lab.Cas. P 11,182 CONTINENTAL WEB PRESS, INC., Petitioner, Cross-Respondent, v. NATIONAL LABOR RELATIONS BOARD, Respondent, Cross-Petitioner, v. CHICAGO LOCAL 245, GRAPHIC ARTS INTERNATIONAL UNION,arty-Intervenor- Respondent.
• Court: U.S. Court of Appeals — Seventh Circuit

Page 1087

742 F.2d 1087

117 L.R.R.M. (BNA) 2145, 101 Lab.Cas. P 11,182

CONTINENTAL WEB PRESS, INC., Petitioner, Cross-Respondent, v. NATIONAL LABOR RELATIONS BOARD, Respondent, Cross-Petitioner, v. CHICAGO LOCAL 245, GRAPHIC ARTS INTERNATIONAL UNION, AFL-CIO, Party-Intervenor- Respondent.

Nos. 83-2124, 83-2422.

United States Court of Appeals Seventh Circuit.

Argued May 10, 1984.

Decided Aug. 30, 1984.

Julian D. Schreiber, Borovsky, Ehrlich & Kronenberg, Chicago, Ill., for petitioner, cross-respondent.

Eugene Cotton, Cotton, Watt, Jones, King & Bowlus, Chicago, Ill., Corinna Metcalf, Elliott Moore, N.L.R.B., Washington, D.C., for respondent, cross-petitioner and party-intervenor-respondent.

Before POSNER and COFFEY, Circuit Judges, and KELLAM, Senior District Judge. ^*

POSNER, Circuit Judge.

The Continental Web Press, a commercial printer, asks us to set aside an order by the National Labor Relations Board, and the Board asks us to enforce it. The Board found that Continental had committed an unfair labor practice by refusing to bargain with a union that had won an election to represent the company's pressmen, and the Board ordered Continental to bargain. The principal basis for Continental's refusal was its contention that pressmen are not an appropriate unit for collective bargaining, so that the election should never have been held. We must decide whether the Board's unit determination can be upheld.

Section 9(b) of the National Labor Relations Act, as amended, 29 U.S.C. Sec. 159(b), tells the Board to pick in each case "the unit appropriate for the purposes of collective bargaining," but (with immaterial exceptions) offers the Board no guidance in determining appropriateness beyond stating that the unit can be the firm, the craft, the plant, or a subdivision of the plant and that in deciding which one it is to be the Board shall try "to assure to employees the fullest freedom in exercising the rights" guaranteed by the Act. All this, as we shall see in a moment, comes to very little; and the absence of statutory criteria has reinforced the natural tendency of reviewing courts to defer to specialized administrative bodies, with the result that the Board's unit determinations are rarely disturbed on appeal. The courts' obeisant attitude is epitomized by the frequent statement that the Board need only choose an appropriate unit--its choice need not be the most appropriate unit. See, e.g., Magic Pan, Inc. v. NLRB, 627 F.2d 105, 107 (7th Cir.1980) (per curiam); NLRB v. Chicago Health & Tennis Clubs, Inc., 567 F.2d 331, 334-35 (7th Cir.1977). As this is not what the statute says, the real point must be that the reviewing court is in no position to decide which among several alternative units is the most appropriate.

Of course the court cannot defer to the Board completely; if convinced that a unit determination is arbitrary--which is to say unreasonable--the court must reverse. But because the statute does not define an "appropriate" bargaining unit, it is very hard for a reviewing court to tell whether a unit determination is arbitrary. See, e.g., NLRB v. Res-Care, Inc., 705 F.2d 1461, 1469 (7th Cir.1983). About all the court can do--recognizing that section 9(b) is a broad delegation of power to the Board--is to insist that the Board apply with reasonable consistency whatever standard it adopts to guide the exercise of its delegated power.

The Board has a standard: it will approve a unit if but only if the members have a "community of interest." But the words provide little direction. There is a sense in which all people employed in the same firm, the same craft, or even the same industry share a community of interest, and there is a sense in which every worker is a separate "community of interest" because workers differ in age, in the value they place on leisure, in their preferred trade-off between present and future consumption, in their attitude toward risk, and in other dimensions, which, when all are added together, make every worker unique. It would have been helpful, therefore, if the Board had tried to give "community of interest" a precise meaning, or at least had explained the purpose behind the formula. The Board has done neither of these things. All one can say about the practical application of the Board's standard is that, in deciding how much "community of interest" is required for a proposed unit to be deemed appropriate, the Board seems to weigh, though not explicitly, the following considerations. See NLRB v. Res-Care, Inc., supra, 705 F.2d at 1468-69; Gorman, Basic Text on Labor Law 67-68 (1976).

On the one hand, the more homogeneous the group of workers composing a proposed unit is with respect to the terms and conditions of employment--the greater, in other words, the community of interest among those workers is--the more likely they are to be well served by a single, exclusive bargaining representative, and the less likely there is to be a dissatisfied minority. This consideration argues for requiring a high degree of homogeneity as a condition for approving a separate unit. On the other hand, an extremely homogeneous group is likely to be very small, which in turn implies that there may be many bargaining units--each perhaps represented by a different union--in the same plant. It is costly for an employer to have to negotiate separately with a number of different unions, and the costs are not borne by the employer alone. The different unions may have inconsistent goals, yet any one of the unions may be able to shut down the plant (or curtail its operations) by a strike, thus imposing costs on other workers as well as on the employer's shareholders, creditors, suppliers, and customers. (Congress expressed concern about the effects of "proliferation of bargaining units" when it made nonprofit health-care institutions subject to the National Labor Relations Act in 1974. See Res-Care, supra, 705 F.2d at 1469-70; S.Rep. No. 766, 93d Cong., 2d Sess. 5 (1974), U.S.Code Cong. & Admin.News 1974, p. 3946; H.R.Rep. No. 1051, 93d Cong., 2d Sess. 7 (1974).) Apart from concern with the impact on the employer's operations, breaking up a work force into many small units creates a danger that some of them will be so small and powerless that it will be worth no one's while to organize them, in which event the members of these units will be left out of the collective bargaining process. But the other side of this coin is that small, homogeneous units usually are cheaper to organize than larger ones, and often are more effective. Fewer workers have to be contacted, and there is less danger that conflicts of interest will prevent the formation of an effective majority coalition. Also, the smaller a group is (other things being equal), the cheaper it will be for the employer to meet the group's demands (provided there are not a lot of other small units, each with its own stiff demands); thus the benefits of organization will be concentrated but the costs spread over the whole output of the plant.

Navigating through such a welter of competing considerations is obviously a difficult task and one for which (as we have said) neither the statute nor the standard that the Board has adopted to carry out its statutory duty provides guidance. Maybe, as suggested in Res-Care, supra, 705 F.2d at 1469, the provision in section 9(b) that tells the Board to choose a unit that will best protect the workers' statutory rights suggests a tilt in favor of whatever unit a union petitioning for recognition proposes. But section 9(c)(5) of the Act, 29 U.S.C. Sec. 159(c)(5), is against this suggestion ("In determining whether a unit is appropriate for the purposes specified in subsection (b) of this section the extent to which the employees have organized shall not be controlling"); and, as we just noted, a unit preferred by one group of workers might be inimical to another group. This is a particularly significant consideration because section 7 of the Act, 29 U.S.C. Sec. 157, guarantees not only the right of employees "to self-organization, to form, join, or assist labor organizations, [and] to bargain collectively through representatives of their own choosing," but also "the right to refrain from any or all of such activities ...." Maybe, then, a neutral stance, giving no weight to the fact that a union may prefer a particular unit, is the appropriate one. But that makes the task for the Board even harder. It also means that a reviewing court is unlikely to set aside the Board's determination unless the unit seems not to make any sense, as would be true if the Board directed that a homogeneous work force be broken up into separate units, see, e.g., NLRB v. Meyer Label Co., 597 F.2d 18, 22 (2d Cir.1979); Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America v. NLRB, 491 F.2d 595, 598-99 (5th Cir.1974); NLRB v. Pinkerton's, Inc., 428 F.2d 479 (6th Cir.1970)--a course most unlikely to be in the best interests of the work force as a whole.

But that, Continental Web says, is precisely what the Board did in this case: it broke up a homogeneous work force into separate units. According to the facts as found by the Board, Continental's lithographic (i.e., photo-offset) production process consists of two stages. In the first, "preparatory employees" as they are called make plates by photographing the customer's art work and then mounting the negatives. They work in rooms off the main area of the plant (where the printing presses are), presumably to control lighting and assure cleanliness while the customer's art work is being photographed. The pressmen (the workers who run the printing presses) come into the preparatory department to pick up the plates, which are then run in the presses. Sometimes the pressmen bring the plates back to the preparatory department to be checked or corrected, and sometimes preparatory employees make corrections on the plates in the presses. The pressmen have a different supervisor and a different...