Fire Fighters Union v. City of Vallejo

• Decision Date: 02 October 1974
• Docket Number: AFL-CI,P,S.F. 23098
• Citation: 116 Cal.Rptr. 507,526 P.2d 971,12 Cal.3d 608
• Court: California Supreme Court
• Parties: , 526 P.2d 971, 87 L.R.R.M. (BNA) 2453, 75 Lab.Cas. P 53,473 FIRE FIGHTERS UNION, LOCAL 1186, INTERNATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF FIRE FIGHTERS,laintiff and Appellant, v. CITY OF VALLEJO et al., Defendants and Appellants. In Bank

Page 507

116 Cal.Rptr. 507

12 Cal.3d 608, 526 P.2d 971, 87 L.R.R.M. (BNA) 2453,

75 Lab.Cas. P 53,473

FIRE FIGHTERS UNION, LOCAL 1186, INTERNATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF FIRE FIGHTERS, AFL-CIO, Plaintiff and Appellant, v. CITY OF VALLEJO et al., Defendants and Appellants.

S.F. 23098.

Supreme Court of California,

In Bank.

Oct. 2, 1974.

Davis, Cowell & Bowe, Alan C. Davis and Roland C. Davis, San Francisco, for plaintiff and appellant.

Charles P. Scully, Donald C. Carroll, San Francisco, Bodle, Fogel, Julber, Reinhardt & Rothschild, George E. Bodle, Daniel Fogel, Stephen Reinhardt, Loren R. Rothschild and Lester G. Ostrov, Los Angeles, as amici curiae on behalf of plaintiff and appellant.

John M. Powers, City Atty., St. Sure, Moore, Hoyt & Sizoo and Ralph B. Hoyt, Oakland, for defendants and appellants.

Burt Pines, City Atty. (Los Angeles) Lawrence L. Hoffman, Asst. City Atty., John B. Rice and Bert Glennon, Jr., Deputy City Attys., John H. Larson, County Counsel (Los Angeles), Daniel C. Cassidy, Acting Chief Deputy County Counsel, Martin E. Weekes, Deputy County Counsel, Los Angeles, Richard S. Whitmore and Gillio & Whitmore, Sunnyvale, as amici curiae on behalf of defendants and appellants.

TOBRINER, Justice.

In this case of first impression we must delineate the function of the court in interpreting a provision for arbitration in a city charter affecting public employees. Specifically we are asked, prior to the arbitration proceeding itself, to reconcile clauses which substantively overlap: a provision that grants city employees the right to bargain on 'wages, hours and working conditions' but withholds that right as to matters involving the 'merits, necessity or organization of any governmental service.' As we shall explain, our attempt now to define the issues of arbitration so that they assume the shape of rigid categories would be to reach premature judgments without benefit of the factual foundations of an arbitral record and to impede the arbitration process itself. We therefore largely leave to the arbitrators the moulding and resolution of the issues, subject to the proviso that neither party may be bound by a decision in excess of the arbitrators' jurisdiction.

In 1971, during negotiations between representatives of the City of Vallejo and the Fire Fighters Union as to the terms of a new contract, the parties failed to agree on 28 issues. Pursuant to the process prescribed in the city charter, they submitted the disputed matters to mediation and fact finding. When these procedures failed to effect a resolution, the city agreed to submit 24 of the issues to arbitration but contended that four other issues, namely, 'Personnel Reduction,' 'Vacancies and Promotions,' 'Schedule of Hours,' and 'Constant Manning Procedure,' involved the 'merits, necessity or organization' of the fire fighting service and did not come under the arbitrable provisions. The city refused to accept the recommendations of the fact finding panel with respect to these issues or to submit them to arbitration.

On December 22, 1971, prior to the scheduled hearing before the board of arbitrators, the Fire Fighters Union filed a complaint in the Solano Superior Court seeking mandate to compel the city to submit the four disputed issues to arbitration. The court found for the union on all the issues, stating: '(T)he evidence introduced here supports findings that the issues 'Reduction of Personnel,' 'Vacancies and Promotions,' 'Schedule of Hours' and 'Constant Manning Procedures,' are related to 'wages, hours and conditions of employment' . . .. (W)hile the issues might also apply to the exclusionary language 'but not on matters involving the merits, necessity or organization of any service or activity provided by law,' to so hold would be to defeat the overriding purpose of the Meyers-Milias-Brown Act and section 809 of the Vallejo charter, namely to provide peace and harmony with the city's public safety employees. The court cannot engage in judicial legislation and write into the Vallejo charter words or meaning that are not there.' The court therefore ordered that a peremptory writ of mandate issue directing the city to proceed to arbitration on the disputed issues. ¹ The city appeals.

The present controversy therefore involves an interpretation of the Vallejo City Charter provisions which govern public employee contract negotiations. The provisions for multi-level resolution of disputes at issue were drafted by a board of freeholders for incorporation in a new city charter in response to a strike by city police and fire fighters in July of 1969. These proposals, with the exception of a provision for final binding arbitration were accepted by the city council and embodied in section 809 of the city charter. Section 809 sets up a 'system of collective negotiating' and provides that city employees shall have the right to 'negotiate on matters of wages, hours and working conditions, but not on matters involving the merits, necessity, or organization of any service or activity provided by law. . . .' The section further provides that if the parties cannot reach agreement, they must submit successively to mediation and fact finding. ²

The arbitration provisions rejected by the city council were submitted to the citizens of Vallejo in a referendum in 1970 and approved. The electorate added to the city charter section 810 which provides that if representatives of the city and its employees do not reach agreement after the report of the fact finding committee under section 809, the issues upon which they fail to agree shall be submitted to binding arbitration. ³

The scope of bargaining provision in the Vallejo City Charter in large measure parallels that set out in the Meyers-Milias-Brown Act (Gov.Code, §§ 3500--3510). ⁴ Government Code section 3504 reads: 'The scope of representation shall include all matters relating to employment conditions and employer-employee relations, including, but not limited to, wages, hours and other terms and conditions of employment, except, however, that the scope of representation shall not include consideration of the merits, necessity, or organization of any service or activity provided by law or executive order.' Therefore, interpretation of the scope of bargaining language in the Vallejo charter necessarily bears upon the meaning of the same language in the Meyers-Milias-Brown Act. ⁵

In the instant case, as we have stated, we are called upon to render a preliminary decision as to the scope of the arbitration. The arbitration process, however, is an ongoing one in which normally an arbitrator, rather than a court, will narrow and define the issues, rejecting those matters over which he cannot properly exercise jurisdiction because they fall exclusively within the rights of management. As Professor Grodin has observed: '. . . collective bargaining and issues arbitration are together a dynamic process, in which the positions of the parties and their interaction with the arbitrator is in a state of constant flux. Proposals get modified and non-negotiable positions become negotiable as the parties sort out their priorities, develop understanding of the implications of their positions, and perceive alternative solutions which they may not previously have considered. To determine what is arbitrable and what is not against this changing context is a bit like trying a balancing act in the middle of a rushing torrent.' (Grodin, California Public Employee Bargaining Revisited: The MMB Act in the Appellate Courts (1974) Cal.Pub.Employee Rel. No. 21, p. 17.)

To a large extent the rendition of the definitions involved in this case will be welded by the facts developed in arbitration itself. We put the proposition in these words in Butchers' Union Local 229 v. Cudahy Packing Co. (1967) 66 Cal.2d 925, 938, 59 Cal.Rptr. 713, 720, 428 P.2d 849, 856: 'Because arbitration substitutes for economic warfare the peaceful adjudication of disputes, and because controversy takes on ephemeral shapes and unforeseeable forms, courts do not congeal arbitration provisions into fixed molds but give them dynamic sweep.' We therefore must be careful not to restrict unduly the Scope of the arbitration by an overbroad definition of 'merits, necessity or organization.' Nor does this cautious judicial approach expose the city to an excessive assertion of the arbitrators' jurisdiction; the city council After the rendition of the award may reject any award that invades its authority over matters involving 'merits, necessity or organization' since the charter itself limits the scope of the arbitration decision to that which is 'consistent with applicable law.' ⁶

With this caveat in mind, we approach the specific problem of reconciling the two vague, seemingly overlapping phrases of the statute: 'wages, hours and working conditions,' which, broadly read could encompass practically any conceivable bargaining proposal; and 'merits, necessity or organization of any service' which, expansively interpreted, could swallow the whole provision for collective negotiation and relegate determination of all labor issues to the city's discretion.

In attempting to reconcile these provisions, we note that the phrase 'wages, hours and other terms and conditions of employment' in the MMBA was taken directly from the National Labor Relations Act ⁷ (hereinafter NLRA). (See Grodin, Public Employee Bargaining in California: The Meyers-Milias-Brown Act in the Courts (1972) 23 Hastings L.J. 719, 749.) The Vallejo charter only slightly changed the phrasing to 'wages, hours and working conditions.' A whole body of federal law has developed over a period of several decades interpreting the meaning of the federal act's 'wages, hours and other terms and conditions of employment.'

In the past we have frequently referred to such federal precedent in interpreting parallel language in state labor legislation. Thus, for example, in Englund v. Chavez (...