Sheet Metal Workers& Int'l Assoc v. Alliance Mech.Al Corp.

• Decision Date: 22 December 2010
• Docket Number: Case No. SACV 09-1163 RNB
• Court: U.S. District Court — Central District of California
• Parties: SHEET METAL WORKERS' INTERNATIONAL ASSOC., LOCAL UNION NO. 115, Petitioner, v. ALLIANCE MECHANICAL CORP., Respondent. and RELATED CROSS-PETITION

SHEET METAL WORKERS' INTERNATIONAL ASSOC., LOCAL UNION NO. 115, Petitioner,

v. ALLIANCE MECHANICAL CORP., Respondent.and RELATED CROSS-PETITION

Case No. SACV 09-1163 RNB

UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT CENTRAL DISTRICT OF CALIFORNIA

Dated: December 22, 2010

MEMORANDUM OPINION AND ORDER THEREON

This is an action to enforce an arbitration award arising under § 301 of the Labor Management Relations Act (Taft-Hartley Act), 29 U.S.C. § 185. Venue in the Central District of California is proper as the underlying agreement was entered into, administered in, and allegedly breached in this district. On February 5, 2010, the parties consented to this Court's jurisdiction pursuant to 28 U.S.C. § 636(c).

The underlying facts are undisputed. Sheet Metal Workers' International Association, Local Union No. 105 (hereinafter the "Union") and Alliance Mechanical Corporation ("Alliance") were parties for several years to a series of collectivebargaining agreements, the most recent of which expired on June 30, 2009. That agreement (hereinafter the "Expired Agreement") contained an "interest arbitration" clause that required the parties to submit any dispute in negotiations over a successor agreement to binding arbitration. The Union brought the matter to the interest arbitration body, the National Joint Arbitration Board ("NJAB"), and an arbitration hearing was held in September of 2009. On September 10, 2009, the NJAB issued an arbitration award (the "Award").

Now pending before the Court and ready for decision are the parties' cross-motions for summary judgment, which have been filed in the form of a Joint Stipulation Re Subjects of Bargaining ("Joint Stipulation"). Each party seeks to enforce the Award, which supplies the terms for the new collective bargaining agreement (the "Agreement") between the parties. The parties' dispute arises out of the following section of the Award:

"In issuing this order, it is not the intention of the NJAB to impose any non-mandatory subject of bargaining over the objections of the Employer [Alliance]. To the extent that the Employer objects to any provision in the agreement that is determined to be a non-mandatory subject by the National Labor Relations Board or a court, such provision shall be deleted."

The parties agree that the foregoing section of the Award permits Alliance to exclude from the Agreement provisions that were included in the Expired Agreement, but which constitute non-mandatory subjects of bargaining. However, they disagree about which provisions are non-mandatory. It appears from the Joint Stipulation that the provisions from the Expired Agreement that remain in dispute are the following¹:

A. Standard Form Union Agreement, Article V, Section 4.

B. Standard Form Union Agreement, Article X, Sections 3-4 (and all provisions referring thereto).

C. Residential Addendum No. 9.

D. Residential Addendum No. 26, Section 8(3).

E. Residential Addendum No. 30, Section 7, ¶ 4.

F. Residential Addendum No. 49.

DISCUSSION

Preliminarily, the Court notes that it is well-settled that courts should not themselves seek to clarify ambiguous arbitration awards. See Sunshine Mining Co. v. United Steelworkers of America, 823 F.2d 1289, 1295 (9th Cir. 1987) (courts should not construe ambiguous arbitration awards, but rather should remand such awards to the arbitrator for clarification); Teamsters Local No. 579 v. B & M Transit, Inc., 882 F.2d 274, 278 (7th Cir. 1989) (same); Bell Aerospace Co. Div. of Textron, Inc. v. Local 516, 500 F.2d 921, 923 (2nd Cir. 1974) (same). This is true of actions brought under § 301 of the Labor Management Relations Act (Taft-Hartley Act), 29 U.S.C. § 185, and the Federal Arbitration Act, 9 U.S.C. § 1. See Granite Rock Co. v. International Broth. of Teamsters, 130 S. Ct. 2847, 2858-59, 177 L. Ed. 2d 567 (2010) (comparing labor arbitration and the Federal Arbitration Act: "Our use of the same rules in [Federal Arbitration Act] cases is also unsurprising."); Ethyl Corp. v. United Steelworkers of America, AFL-CIO-CLC, 768 F.2d 180, 184 (7th Cir. 1985) (referring to the Taft-Hartley Act, the Railway Labor Act, and the Federal Arbitration Act: "In meaning if not in words, the test is the same under all three statutes."), cert. denied, 475 U.S. 1010 (1986).

Here, the dispute between the parties arises out of the section of the Award that permits Alliance to exclude from the Agreement any provision that was included in the Expired Agreement, but which is a non-mandatory subject of bargaining. The term "mandatory subject of bargaining" refers to the obligation of employers and unions to bargain over "wages, hours, and other terms and conditions of employment." See 29 U.S.C. § 158(d). It is an unfair labor practice to refuse to bargain over such subjects. See 29 U.S.C. § 158(a)(5). Thus, the term "non-mandatory subject of bargaining" is not ambiguous, but rather very precisely refers to those subjects as to which the obligation to bargain does not apply. See NLRB v. Wooster Div. of Borg-Warner Corp., 356 U.S. 342, 349, 78 S. Ct. 718, 2 L. Ed. 2d 823 (1958) ("Read together, these provisions establish the obligation of the employer and the representative of its employees to bargain with each other in good faith with respect to 'wages, hours, and other terms and conditions of employment.' The duty is limited to those subjects, and within that area neither party is legally obligated to yield. As to other matters, however, each party is free to bargain or not to bargain, and to agree or not to agree." (internal citations omitted)). A non-mandatory term may be the subject of bargaining, but neither an employer nor a union has any obligation to bargain whatsoever over such a term; nor may either party bargain to impasse over such a term. See id.

A. Standard Form Union Agreement, Article V, Section 4

Article V, Section 4 of the Expired Agreement provided: The Employer [Alliance] agrees to deduct Union dues, assessment or service fees (excluding fines and initiation fees) from each week's pay of those employees who have authorized such deductions in writing, irrespective of whether they are Union members. No later than the twentieth day of each month, the Employer shall remit to the designated financial officer of the Union the amount of deductions made for the prior month, together with a list of employees and their Social Security numbers for whom such deductions have been made.

A provision in a collective bargaining agreement under which the employer "agree[s] to deduct union dues directly from employee paychecks and remit them to the union" is known as a dues checkoff clause. See Local Joint Executive Board of Las Vegas, Culinary Workers Union Local 226 v. NLRB, 309 F.3d 578, 580 (9th Cir. 2002). While Alliance seemingly concedes that a dues checkoff clause is a mandatory subject of bargaining, it argues that after the expiration of a collective bargaining agreement, a dues checkoff clause becomes non-mandatory if severed from a "union security clause."² (See Joint Stipulation at 5.) Alliance contends that the phrase "irrespective of whether they are Union members" in the dues checkoff clause here severs it from the union security clause appearing in Article V, Section 1 of the Expired Agreement. (See id. at 6.)

In support of its position, Alliance relies on the Ninth Circuit's decision in Local Joint Executive Board of Las Vegas v. NLRB, 540 F.3d 1072 (9th Cir. 2008). There, the issue was whether the Supreme Court's holding in NLRB v. Katz, 369 U.S. 736, 747, 82 S. Ct. 1107, 8 L. Ed. 2d 230 (1962), that an employer violates § 8(a)(5) of the National Labor Relations Act (the "NLRA"), 29 U.S.C. § 158(a)(5), when theemployer unilaterally implements or alters a term or condition of employment that is a mandatory subject of bargaining, applied to a dues checkoff clause severed from a union security clause. The union in Local Joint Executive Board had alleged an unfair labor practice arising out of the employer's termination of union dues checkoffs before bargaining to agreement or impasse. The National Labor Relations Board (the "NLRB") had ruled that this practice was permissible under its decisions in Bethlehem Steel Co., 136 NLRB 1500, 1502 (1962) and Bethlehem Steel's progeny, which held that, although union security clauses and dues checkoff clauses were mandatory subjects of bargaining, an employer was lawfully permitted to unilaterally change terms relating to these subjects after the termination of a previous collective bargaining agreement. See Local Joint Executive Board, 540 F.3d at 107677. However, the Ninth Circuit was not persuaded by this rationale as it could not discern why the same rule would apply to Bethlehem Steel, a case there was both a union security and a dues checkoff clause, and the case before it, in which there was no union security clause due to Nevada's right-to-work law, but only a separate dues checkoff clause. See id. at 1075.

The case before the Court involves the construction of an arbitration award, not the unilateral implementation of terms by an employer. Accordingly, the stalemate reached by the Ninth Circuit and the NLRB on the applicability of Katz to a dues checkoff clause severed from a union security clause has no bearing on this Court's resolution of the issue before it.

The only issue before this Court is whether the provisions that Alliance seeks to exclude from the Agreement constitute non-mandatory subjects of bargaining. Local Joint Executive Board does not stand for the proposition that a dues checkoff clause is a non-mandatory subject of bargaining. That issue is settled. See Cherry Hill Textiles, 309 NLRB 268, 269 (1992); Hall Industries, 293 NLRB 758, 792 (1989); Hassett Maintenance Corp., 260 NLRB 1211 (1982); see also Litton Financial Printing Div., a Div. of Litton Business Systems, Inc. v. NLRB, 501 U.S. 190, 199, 111 S. Ct. 2215; 115 L. Ed. 2d 177 (1991) (referring to dues checkoff clauses as mandatory subjects of bargaining).

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