Virgin Islands Nursing Association's Bargaining Unit v. Schneider

• Decision Date: 30 December 1981
• Docket Number: No. 81-1748,81-1748
• Parties: 109 L.R.R.M. (BNA) 2323, 93 Lab.Cas. P 13,211 VIRGIN ISLANDS NURSING ASSOCIATION'S BARGAINING UNIT, Appellant, v. Dr. Roy L. SCHNEIDER, Commissioner of Health, and Department of Health.
• Court: U.S. Court of Appeals — Third Circuit

Page 221

668 F.2d 221

109 L.R.R.M. (BNA) 2323, 93 Lab.Cas. P 13,211

VIRGIN ISLANDS NURSING ASSOCIATION'S BARGAINING UNIT, Appellant, v. Dr. Roy L. SCHNEIDER, Commissioner of Health, and Department of Health.

No. 81-1748.

United States Court of Appeals Third Circuit.

Argued Dec. 7, 1981.

Decided Dec. 30, 1981.

Alexander A. Farrelly (argued), Birch, De Jongh & Farrelly, Charlotte Amalie, St. Thomas, V. I., for appellant.

Richard R. Knoepfel (argued), Asst. Atty. Gen., Dept. of Law, Charlotte Amalie, St. Thomas, V. I., for appellees.

Before HUNTER, SLOVITER, and VAN DUSEN, Circuit Judges.

OPINION OF THE COURT

SLOVITER, Circuit Judge.

This is an appeal from summary judgment entered by the district court in favor of the appellees, Dr. Roy L. Schneider, Commissioner of Health, and the Virgin Islands Department of Health (hereafter referred to jointly as Department of Health), in a suit brought by the Virgin Islands Nurses Association's Bargaining Unit (hereafter Nurses Association) seeking to vacate an arbitrator's award. The Nurses Association challenges the arbitrator's award primarily on the ground that it contained no opinion, no factual summary of the arguments advanced by both parties, no findings of fact and no reason or rationale. Both parties moved for summary judgment. The district court found that there was no genuine issue as to any material fact, ruled that the arbitrator was under no legal or contractual obligation to provide an explanatory opinion, and therefore granted the motion of the Department of Health for summary judgment. We will affirm.

The Nurses Association and the Department of Health are signatories to a collective bargaining agreement which provides, in Article XVI, that "The Employer shall post in each agency in a conspicuous place a list for all RN positions abailable (sic) in the Department of Health quarterly." App. 51. Contending that the Department of Health violated this provision by hiring an Assistant Director of Nursing without compliance with the posting requirement, the Nurses Association first grieved its claim unsuccessfully and then proceeded to arbitration. On January 9, 1980 the arbitrator made the following award on this claim:

IT IS THE FINDING OF THE ARBITRATOR THAT the Commissioner of Health, Dr. Roy L. Schneider did not violate the terms of the contract when he hired an Assistant Director of Nursing which, additionally according to the testimonies received, is an unclassified position.

The Nurses Association requested clarification objecting, in part, to the absence of an opinion and when no further elucidation was forthcoming, it filed the instant lawsuit.

The Nurses Association makes an attractive argument in favor of the desirability of requiring arbitrators to write opinions. It argues that such opinions would establish a general body of precedent to guide management in administering the contract, to guide unions in deciding which cases to bring to arbitration, and to guide arbitrators in making further decisions. ¹ It argues that a requirement of arbitral opinions will help to insure that an arbitrator will consider the opposing contentions and formulate a coherent resolution, and that the need to articulate reasons may influence the arbitrator to consider the matter carefully. Such a requirement would also meet the salutary purpose served by all written opinions, explanation to the losing party why it lost and evidence that its arguments were considered. In support, the Nurses Association cites Professor Getman's article which discusses the value of opinions by arbitrators in the same terms. See Getman, Labor Arbitration and Dispute Resolution, 88 Yale L.J. 916, 920-21 (1979).

The Department of Health agrees that there are distinct advantages to be served by requiring opinions of arbitrators but argues that we should not impose such a requirement in this case because the absence of a record would make it difficult for the arbitrator to reconstruct the basis of his decision. This concurrence between the parties on the desirability of arbitral opinions leads us to consider whether we should, as appellant requests, exercise our supervisory power to require an arbitrator either in this case or in future cases, "to provide a record of the reasons and grounds upon which his award is predicated and point out the evidence upon which the ultimate findings rest." Appellants' Brief at 14. We decline to do so for a number of reasons.

In the first place, in United Steelworkers v. Enterprise Wheel and Car Corp., 363 U.S. 593, 598, 80 S.Ct. 1358, 1361, 4 L.Ed.2d 1424 (1960), the Supreme Court stated, albeit in dictum, "(a)rbitrators have no obligation to the court to give their reasons for an award." That view was reiterated by this court in NF&M Corp. v. United Steelworkers, 524 F.2d 756, 759 (3d Cir. 1975). The basis for this position stems from the limited function played by the courts in reviewing arbitral awards. A court cannot set aside an arbitrator's award merely because it disagrees with the arbitrator on the merits, for such a policy would undermine the federal policy of encouraging the settling of labor disputes by arbitration. Enterprise Wheel, 363 U.S. at 596, 80 S.Ct. at 1360. It must only determine whether the arbitrator's decision "draws its essence from the collective bargaining Agreement." Id. at 597, 80 S.Ct. at 1361. As explained in United Steelworkers v. Warrior & Gulf Navigation Co., 363 U.S. 574, 581-82, 80 S.Ct. 1347, 1352-53, 4 L.Ed.2d 1409 (1960), the arbitrator is bound to render a decision on the basis of the express terms of the collective bargaining agreement itself and the "industrial common law" or the "common law of the shop"-i.e. the practices of the industry and the shop which are impliedly part of the agreement. Thus, federal courts are limited to insuring that arbitration awards are based on the agreement and the law of the shop, and such awards must be upheld if they are not in "manifest disregard of the law" and can be rationally derived from the permissible sources of law. Ludwig Honold Mfg. Co. v. Fletcher, 405 F.2d 1123, 1128 (3d Cir. 1969). As described by Professor Gorman, this standard requires only "minimal rationality" of the arbitrator's decision. See R. Gorman, Basic Text on Labor Law 586 (1976).

The Nurses Association does claim in summary fashion that the arbitration award in this case is "totally unsupported by principles of contract construction and the law of the shop", but it does not attempt to support this claim on the merits. Although it is difficult for us to hypothesize as to the basis on which the arbitrator made his award because we do not know the contentions which were made by the parties in the arbitration proceeding, the arbitrator's award itself suggests that he could have found the position of Assistant Director of Nursing was not a position which required posting. The Nurses Association does not contend that such a construction would be either arbitrary or capricious on the merits and relies solely on the absence of an opinion or findings of fact. However, the principal cases cited by the ...