Teamsters Local Union No. 42 v. Supervalu, Inc.

• Decision Date: 08 February 2000
• Docket Number: No. 99-1688,99-1688
• Citation: 212 F.3d 59
• Parties: (1st Cir. 2000) TEAMSTERS LOCAL UNION NO. 42, PLAINTIFF, APPELLANT, v. SUPERVALU, INC., DEFENDANT, APPELLEE. Heard
• Court: U.S. Court of Appeals — First Circuit

Page 59

212 F.3d 59 (1st Cir. 2000)

TEAMSTERS LOCAL UNION NO. 42, PLAINTIFF, APPELLANT, v. SUPERVALU, INC., DEFENDANT, APPELLEE.

No. 99-1688

United States Court of Appeals For the First Circuit

Heard February 8, 2000

Decided May 15, 2000

[Copyrighted Material Omitted] John D. Burke, with whom Law Offices of Gabriel Dumont was on brief, for appellant.

Keith P. Spiller, with whom Thompson Hine & Flory Llp, Gregory C. Keating, and Choate, Hall & Stewart were on brief, for appellee.

Before Torruella, Chief Judge, Selya and Lipez, Circuit Judges.

Selya, Circuit Judge.

Arbitral awards are nearly impervious to judicial oversight. See Advest, Inc. v. McCarthy, 914 F.2d 6, 8-9 (1st Cir. 1990) (describing exceptions); Maine Cent. R.R. Co. v. Brotherhood of Maintenance of Way Employees, 873 F.2d 425, 428 (1st Cir. 1989) ("Judicial review of an arbitration award is among the narrowest known in the law."). Accordingly, disputes that are committed by contract to the arbitral process almost always are won or lost before the arbitrator. Successful court challenges are few and far between.

Undaunted by this bleak prospect, Local Union No. 42 (Local 42 or the union), a Teamsters affiliate, invited a federal district court to vacate a labor arbitrator's award in favor of Supervalu, Inc. (Supervalu or the employer). The court refused the invitation. Because we agree that the arbitrator, regardless of whether his decision was right or wrong, acted within the realm of the authority vested in him by the applicable collective bargaining agreement, we affirm.

I. BACKGROUND

Supervalu is a large wholesale grocer that operates a regional facility in Andover, Massachusetts. Local 42 represents all the warehouse workers and truck drivers at that site. The parties' current collective bargaining agreement (the CBA) took effect in May of 1994. Among other things, the CBA designates Local 42 as the exclusive bargaining agent for its members lays out wage rates for the multi-year period covered by the pact (distinguishing, in the process, between "present" and "new" full-time employees), and sets out guidelines for the allocation of benefits.

About two months before the CBA took effect, Supervalu acquired the business of a competitor, Sweet Life Foods (SLF), which operated a grocery warehouse in Northboro, Massachusetts. As part of that transaction, Supervalu assumed the collective bargaining agreement then in effect between SLF and Teamsters Local 170 (which represented workers at the Northboro facility). Supervalu soon decided to move all the Northboro work to Andover, transferring some of the crew and discharging the rest. To that end, it commenced negotiations with Local 170 anent transfer and severance terms, but failed to reach an accord.

In August of 1994, Supervalu made a so-called "final and best offer" to Local 170 in the form of a memorandum that, among other things, laid out anticipated terms of engagement (including compensation) for those workers who would be redirected to Andover. Supervalu informed a representative of Local 42 about the proposal (or so the arbitrator supportably found), but it never bargained with Local 42 anent the terms and conditions of the transferees' employment. In all events, neither Local 170 nor Local 42 ever formally accepted the offer. Supervalu, acting unilaterally, nonetheless started shifting workers from Northboro to Andover in late August and September. Upon reporting for duty at Andover, the transferees automatically became members of Local 42.

Supervalu applied the wage rate and conditions of employment specified in the memorandum to the transferred workers. Overall, these terms were a compromise between treating them like veteran employees and treating them like neophytes. ¹ This hermaphroditic status sowed the seeds for an horrific harvest.

The first poisonous plant bloomed when the union, acting on the transferees' behalf, grieved the allocation of bonus days (i.e., extra personal days), charging that under Article 25 of the CBA the transferees' entitlement to bonus days should be determined in light of their years of service with SLF. In mounting this challenge, the union brushed aside the CBA's definition of seniority as "the period of employment with [Supervalu] in the work covered by this Agreement, at the terminal (or terminals) within the jurisdiction of the Local," and posited that "years/service" - the critical integer in the bonus days equation - was a broader term that could include periods in the employ of SLF. Supervalu rejected the grievance, asserting that years of service, like seniority, had to be calculated from the date it hired an employee to work full time at Andover.

The parties submitted the case to arbitration. The arbitrator, Greenbaum, observed that some workers who came to the Andover facility from acquired companies had been permitted to carry over years of service (as well as seniority). She then determined that, from and after 1989, the terms "years/service" and "seniority" had developed distinct meanings. Beginning at that time, the CBA made provision for "casual employees," i.e., part-time workers hired, as needed, to toil in the Andover warehouse, and those employees, collectively, had come to constitute the pool from which most new full-time workers were recruited. Arbitrator Greenbaum noted that when a casual worker became a regular full-time employee, Supervalu figured his years of service from his original date of hire as a casual employee, even though he accrued no seniority in respect to the time spent in casual work.

The arbitrator found additional support for the theory that years of service and seniority were independent variables in the differing uses of those terms within the four corners of the CBA:

A review of [the terms'] uses in the Agreement shows that where the intent is to provide an employee with a benefit that is non-competitive, i.e., does not impact on any other employee, such as bonus days and entitlement to vacation days, the parties used the synonymous terms of date of hire or years of service or length of service or "the period of employment with the Company" and "in the Company's employ" all meaning essentially the same thing. In contrast, the term "seniority" is generally used where competitive rights are involved. This is the case in bidding for promotions, preferences for vacation schedules, preference for work assignments, . . . .

She also found that this dichotomy characterized the treatment of the transferees (at least to some degree), inasmuch as their vacation entitlement - a non-competitive benefit - was determined in light of the years they had worked at SLF, while preference in vacation scheduling -a competitive benefit - was allocated strictly in accordance with seniority.

Based on these facts, the arbitrator found that, as used in the CBA, "years/service" was broader than "seniority" and sometimes included work other than full-time Local 42 work at the Andover warehouse; and that the transferees' previous service at SLF should have informed the calculation of their bonus days. The fact that the SLF transferees were not treated generically as new hires (unlike another group that had previously joined the work force from an acquired company) contributed heavily to her conclusion that Supervalu had breached the CBA in computing the transferees' entitlement to bonus days without regard to "years/service" (including time spent at SLF). ²

The battleground then shifted to wages and, in particular, to Article 13 of the CBA (governing "minimum hourly wages"). Article 13 sets out separate wage schedules for "present" and "new" full-time workers, and lists wage rates for casual (part-time) workers in a separate chart. Both before and after the CBA took effect, Supervalu's prevailing practice was to pay former casual workers who became regular full-time employees at the rate specified by the controlling CBA for new hires. When Supervalu began to integrate SLF personnel into its Andover work force, it paid them at a rate of $13.23/hr. - one that fell somewhere between the rate for new recruits and the rates applicable to present workers.

Buoyed by Arbitrator Greenbaum's award, Local 42 filed a second grievance. This time, it argued that the starting wages paid to erstwhile casual employees and SLF transferees were too stingy and placed Supervalu in breach of Article 13. The union asseverated that wages, like bonus days and vacation eligibility, were a non-competitive benefit and should be determined by years of service, not seniority, in accordance with Arbitrator Greenbaum's construct. If this were so, the union's thesis ran, workers who had accumulated years of service could not properly be deemed "new," and Supervalu's praxis of paying them differently than "present" employees transgressed the CBA because Article 13 contained no classification for full-time workers other than "new" and "present."

This second grievance was heard by Arbitrator Cooper. He adopted Arbitrator Greenbaum's extensive findings of fact and acknowledged that Local 42 had never agreed to a specific wage scale for the transferees. The question for the transferees, then, was whether the wages unilaterally imposed by the employer breached the CBA. Noting that Article 13's wage-rate provision did not state whether the wage progression limned thereby was to be based upon "seniority" or "years/service," Arbitrator Cooper concluded that the article was thus ambiguous as to whether the transferees and former casual employees -who had accrued years of service but no seniority - were to be regarded as "new" or "present" workers for purposes germane to this article. The arbitrator proceeded to explore the perceived ambiguity.

He first examined the historical development of the wage provisions. Doing so revealed to his satisfaction that paying former casual workers as "present" workers (i.e., according to their original dates of hire) would...