Columbia Local, American Postal Workers Union, AFL-CIO v. Bolger

• Decision Date: 09 May 1980
• Docket Number: AFL-CI,No. 79-1273,A,79-1273
• Parties: 104 L.R.R.M. (BNA) 2341, 88 Lab.Cas. P 12,081 COLUMBIA LOCAL, AMERICAN POSTAL WORKERS UNION,ppellees, v. William F. BOLGER, as Postmaster General of the United States Postal Service, Appellant.
• Court: U.S. Court of Appeals — Fourth Circuit

Page 615

621 F.2d 615

104 L.R.R.M. (BNA) 2341, 88 Lab.Cas. P 12,081

COLUMBIA LOCAL, AMERICAN POSTAL WORKERS UNION, AFL-CIO, Appellees, v. William F. BOLGER, as Postmaster General of the United

States Postal Service, Appellant.

No. 79-1273.

United States Court of Appeals, Fourth Circuit.

Argued Feb. 7, 1980.

Decided May 9, 1980.

Freddi Lipstein, Appellate Staff, Civ. Div., Dept. of Justice, Washington, D. C. (John C. Oldenburg, U. S. Postal Service, Stuart E. Schiffer, Acting Asst. Atty. Gen., Washington, D. C., Thomas E. Lydon, Jr., U. S. Atty., Columbia, S. C., Robert E. Kopp, Appellate Staff, Civ. Div., Dept. of Justice, Washington, D. C., on brief), for appellant.

James L. Bell, Columbia, S. C. (Deborah Wright, Columbia, S. C., on brief), for appellees.

Before HAYNSWORTH, Chief Judge, PHILLIPS, Circuit Judge and ROSZEL C. THOMSEN, United States District Judge for the District of Maryland, sitting by designation.

JAMES DICKSON PHILLIPS, Circuit Judge.

William F. Bolger, as Postmaster General of the United States Postal Service, appeals the entry of a preliminary injunction preventing the Postal Service from implementing certain changes at the Columbia, South Carolina Post Office pending arbitration. Because we conclude that federal injunctive relief was not necessary to protect the arbitral process that was available to resolve the underlying labor dispute in this case, we reverse and vacate the injunctive decree.

I

At the times in issue the Columbia Post Office handled both preferential mail first class and air mail and non-preferential mail bulk rate and other low priority mail. In recent years, however, the Postal Service had been transferring the processing of non-preferential mail from local post offices to regional bulk mail centers. By the end of 1978, a substantial volume of the non-preferential mail had been transferred from Columbia to the bulk mail center in Greensboro, North Carolina, so that eight of the twenty-two employees in the second shift of the Columbia Post Office's non-preferential mail section were no longer needed.

Labor relations at the Columbia Post Office are governed both by a national collective bargaining agreement and by a local memorandum of understanding. The national agreement expressly authorizes such local memoranda of understanding so long as they do not vary the terms of the national agreement. In negotiating the local memorandum of understanding in late 1978, management proposed that the second shifts of the non-preferential and the preferential mail sections be merged. The Local opposed the merger, however, and management desisted. Despite this, management shortly thereafter exercised its power under the national agreement "to hire, promote, transfer, assign and retain employees in positions within the Postal Service" to transfer the remaining employees in the non-preferential shift into newly created positions in other sections, while retaining the non-preferential shift on paper. This move was designed to allow the continued transfer of bulk mail operations to Greensboro and the transfer there of equipment used for bulk mail processing.

The Local filed a grievance under the mandatory grievance-arbitration provision in the national agreement and sought this injunction to halt the proposed management action pending the result of arbitration. In granting preliminary injunctive relief the district court applied a standard "balance of hardship" equitable analysis and found the balance to weigh in favor of the plaintiff. We believe that this mode of analysis failed properly to take into account special considerations controlling the exercise of federal judicial power in arbitrable labor disputes and resulted in an erroneous exercise of that power.

II

The controlling principle is that where, as here, a collective bargaining agreement provides for mandatory grievance-arbitration procedures, the federal courts should not intrude at the behest of either management or labor into disputes over arbitrable issues unless intrusion by injunction is necessary to protect the arbitral process itself.

Boys Markets, Inc. v. Retail Clerks Union Local 770, 398 U.S. 235, 90 S.Ct. 1583, 26 L.Ed.2d 199 (1970), established that the federal courts could, in certain circumstances, enjoin strikes by unions over arbitrable issues. Strikes were the very tactic that arbitration was to obviate and a no-strike obligation, express or implied, was the union's quid pro quo for the employer's undertaking to submit contract disputes to binding arbitration. Unless an employer could have strikes over arbitrable issues enjoined, arbitration as the method for resolving industrial disputes would be severely undermined. Injunction in these circumstances thus enforced a critical underpinning of the arbitral process.

Buffalo Forge Co. v. United Steelworkers of America, 428 U.S. 397, 96 S.Ct. 3141, 49 L.Ed.2d 1022 (1976), made clear that Boys Markets '...