Monthly Archives: March 2016

In Our Opinion..., Labor In The News

The Supreme Court Hands Down An Unexpected Public Sector Union Victory

Amy Laura Davidson
Amy Laura Davidson March 29, 2016

An evenly divided Supreme Court upheld a ruling from the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruling supporting the right of public sector unions to collect fair share fees from employees they represent who are not members of the union. Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association. The result leaves intact a near 40 year old precedent in Abood v. Detroit Board of Education. Abood held that the First Amendment only applies to forced contributions to the union’s political activities. Public sector unions are the exclusive representative and are bound by a duty of fair representation to all bargaining unit members without regard to their union membership. Accordingly, the Court in Abood held that non-members should be required to pay their fair share of the costs of negotiating and administering the contract on their behalf.

Conservative antiunion organizations have been trying to get the Court to overturn Abood since it issued in 1977, whittling down it principles by imposing increasing burdens on unions seeking to collect fair share fees from non-members. When Friedrichs was argued on January 11th the Court seemed poised to overrule precedent. The conservative Justices expressed skepticism about virtually all of the major arguments proffered in support of fair share fees. It seemed almost certain that the high court would rule 5-4 that fair share fees are unconstitutional. But with Justice Scalia’s death there were no longer five justices to do so.

The result of the ruling is a victory for unions. But the decision was a one sentence opinion affirming the 9th Circuit “by an equally divided Court.” It does not set precedent at the Supreme Court level. The next appointment to the Court will have considerable power over this critical issue which undoubtedly will be raised again.

Labor In The News

Appeals Court Upholds Arbitrator’s Award Reinstating Employee, Even Where Arbitrator Found He Sexually Harassed A Co-Worker

Sandulli Grace Staff March 25, 2016

The Massachusetts Appeals Court today upheld an arbitrator’s reinstatement of a City of Springfield employee who was found to have sexually harassed a co-worker. The case is City of Springfield v. United Public Service Employees Unions, No. 15-P-742. The three judge panel, adhering to the high deference afforded an arbitrator’s decision, refused to find that the award violated public policy. The court found that while there is certainly a strong public policy against sexual harassment, the reinstatement of the grievant did not violate that public policy as he was still subject to remedial action for his behavior.

The grievant, a twenty-two year employee of the Springfield housing office with an “unblemished” record, was a messenger for the office. He suffers from “significant physical and mental health problems” and has a “mildly impaired overall [IQ] of 74.” He was fired over one incident, in which he made lewd statements and gestures toward a female employee, causing her significant upset. His union filed a grievance, and following a two day hearing, an arbitrator found that there was not just cause for the termination, and ordered him “reinstated to his position without loss of compensation or other rights.” The arbitrator found that the grievant’s conduct did amount to sexual harassment, but that termination was not justified. The arbitrator based her decision on the grievant’s work history, his physical and mental limitations, and also on the fact that another employee “engaged in a six-month course of sexual harassment directed at a co-worker” and received only a reprimand.

The City first claimed that the failure to uphold termination violates public policy. The court quickly rejected this, pointing out that employers are not required to terminate an employee who sexually harasses another employee, as long as other “appropriate remedial action” is taken. The City next claimed that the award violated public policy in that it ordered the grievant reinstated with no loss of compensation. The City argued that public policy required a sexual harasser to be punished in some way. The Court rejected this argument, noting that “counseling and training” are appropriate remedial responses to sexual harassment, and that the arbitrator’s award did not impede the employer’s right to require such. Again properly noting its limited role in review of an arbitrator, the panel noted that upholding the award “does not suggest that we agree with the arbitrator’s resolution of the matter without loss of compensation or other employment rights, as ‘even our strong disagreement with the result [would] not provide sufficient grounds for vacating the arbitrator’s award.”

The Court’s decision in this case again demonstrates that arbitrator’s awards are subject to great deference on review. Judges properly uphold such awards, even when they disagree with them, as the parties to an arbitration agreement have submitted to the “final and binding” nature of the process.

Read the decision.

In Our Opinion...

The Daily Life Of A Policeman

Sandulli Grace Staff March 10, 2016

In October 1969 the Boston Globe ran a five article series titled “The Daily Life of a Policeman.” The articles include interviews with members of the Boston Police Department, a psychiatrist, and policy pieces summarizing the problems facing the police, along with possible solutions. While these articles are fascinating because they provide a rare look into what it meant to be a police officer in Boston almost fifty years ago, they are also relevant because they describe many pressing problems and dilemmas that mirror many of the issues facing law enforcement today. We were lucky to get our hands on a copy of a pamphlet published by the Globe compiling these articles, and this blog will be a summary of its contents.

Part-1: Society’s New Scapegoat

This series begins with a narrative written from the perspective of an officer working the night shift responding to calls coming from across the city. For the officers working the night shift, it is a “nightmare of being incessantly alert, tense, ready for the unknown, the hidden, the madman, the criminal, the occasional accident, the desperate and the lonely.” While the incidents themselves, including street fights, fatal car accidents, and staring down the barrel of a shotgun at a domestic disturbance, are horrifying and dramatic, the most striking part of this article is the palpable anxiety caused by police work. Even on calls that seem routine, the author emphasizes the need to be ever alert to the unexpected, and the grave danger faced by the officers if they let their guard down for even a second. The author Daniel juxtaposes the rigors of the job with newspaper articles like, for example, “Ridicule, Low Prestige Blamed for Police Recruit Shortage” demeaning the profession. The drama of this article helps transition into the interviews that make up the majority of the series.

Part-2: You Always Know the Smell of Death

The second article in this series is an interview with 41 year old Patrolman Thomas B. Moran. Officer Moran, who was stationed at District 4 in the South End. The article begins with Officer Moran’s experience working the beat as a member of the department’s drug unit, including several vivid descriptions of the tragedy and danger he frequently encountered. The majority of the article, however, deals with psychological stress that comes with being a police officer, and Officer Moran’s thoughts regarding the relationship between the department and the public at that time. The Officer effectively described officer’s struggles with suppressing the human need to lash out at members of the public who attack them and describe them as “pigs” and “fascists” because of their professional obligation to hold themselves to a higher standard than the public. Before opining on the deteriorating conditions of the streets, the ineffectiveness of the prison system to rehabilitate offenders, and do-nothing politicians, Officer Moran stated “I said it before and I’ll say again. Nobody cares. This is the feeling of the police, that nobody cares one way or another.”

Part-3: The Pressures of the Job—Are They Too Great?

The next article includes an interview with Police Superintendent William Bradley. In this interview Juda discussed with Supt. Bradley how the stress of day-to-day police work takes a physical and mental toll on officers, and the need and demand for psychiatric care in the department. While the Superintendent expressed his strong faith in the exceptional maturity and mental strength of his officers, he described the need to make mental health care more accessible so that access to a psychiatrist would no longer be a “luxury” most officers could not afford. Balancing human needs and professional obligations also plays a role in this interview. According to the Superintendent, one of the hardest tasks asked of officers is to set aside his empathy and emotion when responding to tragedy in order to adequately perform necessary tasks like securing the scene and beginning an investigation. Although times change, the unique stresses of police work have not. As a result, police officer access to mental health care will likely always be an important issue.

Part-4: Mental Pressures Make Job Tougher

The last interview of the series is a conversation with Dr. Ruick Rolland, a psychiatrist in the Roxbury Court Clinic. At the outset of the interview, Dr. Rolland described the unique psychological stresses facing police officers, and the effect of those pressures on their performance. The theme of the doctor’s analysis is that officers respond to being overstretched but under appreciated by the public by becoming defensive and becoming apathetic towards their jobs and the people they serve. The Doctor warned that police departments facing an increasingly antagonistic public tend to become increasingly militarized, hampering their ability to work with, not against, the community. In the present era in which there is ever increasing tension between the police and the public, this last point still seems relevant today.

Part-5: Reforms Needed on Basic Problems

The last installment in this series include a list of the most pressing issues the author saw as facing the police department, and his solutions to remedy those problems. The biggest problems he identified are workplace complaints like lack of pay, long hours, the unresponsiveness of management and politicians, and the combativeness of the public. His direct reforms include increasing pay to attract better applicants, raising the prestige of the force, better access to mental health services, and giving officers a mechanism to voice their complaints about the force. Other indirect reforms include adequate facilities for helping alcoholics and drug addicts, better domestic violence protocols, and more money for rehabilitation programs in prison. The author takes an urgent tone in this final article, stressing the grave public safety implications of not implementing reforms as soon as possible. Despite the age of these pamphlets and the irrelevancy of some of the issues they contain, their main theme still holds true today: if society expects the police to effectively support them, the people, department, and politicians need to give them a certain amount of support and respect back.

In Our Opinion..., Labor In The News

Termination Upheld When Safety Violation Was Intentional And There Were Prior Disciplines

Sandulli Grace Staff March 8, 2016

The Labor Arbitration Institute have arbitrators discuss hypothetical employment arbitration scenarios and state how he/she would have ruled. These “decisions” by arbitrators can be helpful in assessing how an arbitrator would rule in real world cases. In this scenario, a two-year employee rigged one of the two handles/levers on a press machine so that the machine would go faster and to alleviate some pain in his left arm that was hurting due to carpal tunnel syndrome. All five arbitrators on the panel would have upheld the discharge because the two levers were specifically there for safety reasons, the conduct was intentional, there was no prior request for an accommodation for carpel tunnel, he had prior discipline for other types of non-safety incidents, and the fact that the Company’s investigation may not have been 100% thorough was adequate enough.

What we can learn from the conclusions these arbitrators came to is that prior disciplines, even if they are for dissimilar conduct, can be used against you as progressive discipline, especially if it’s within a short span of time, and that relying on incomplete training or investigation as a basis for turning over a discipline/discharge comes up short in the face of other factors such as the ones discussed above.

Below is the complete discussion as issued by the Labor Arbitration Institute.

Conference Reporter – Labor Arbitration Institute

Safety Violation with a Poor Record

At this month’s program in Miami, the arbitrators on the panel discussed a case of a 2-year employee. He was a press operator. He had two years with the company, but had bid into a press operator position only 4 days earlier.

The press has two handles or levers. The reason for this is to ensure that the operator does not have either hand near the pinch point. In other words, the operator must use both hands at the same time in order for the press to work.

Four days into the job, the employee is discovered to have tied up the left-hand lever to a post. This allowed him to operate the press with just the right-hand lever. The supervisor asked him why he did this, and he gave two reasons. 1) he could work faster and thus, earn more incentive pay (true); and 2) his left arm was hurting due to carpal tunnel syndrome.

He was discharged for reasons which the panelists address below.

Decision

All five arbitrators on the panel would have upheld the discharge. What is interesting about this is how strongly they all felt, that:

1. There may not be a rule which specifically covers two levers, but the employer can rely upon its general safety rules.
The company went to the expense of providing two levers. These safety devices are there for a reason. The purpose of the device is to keep the employee out of harm’s way. The employee is jeopardizing his own safety.

2. It was intentional.
The union cited two prior cases in which employees were given a written warning. But in each case, the employees committed a one-time mistake. Both were the result of not thinking, and it doesn’t appear that either employee acted deliberately. On the other hand, the grievant did this for 3 days and it was intentional. In fact, is he cheating the other employees by gaining incentive pay that they cannot obtain the same way?

3. He didn’t ask for an accommodation.
He could have asked for an accommodation based on the carpal tunnel, but he didn’t.

4. He had a poor record.
He is a two-year employee, and he has this record: written warning for graphic statements to a supervisor and two written warnings & a 3-day suspension for attendance violations.

5. The Company investigation was adequate enough.
The union argued that the investigation should have included an interview of the trainer. Then, management would have learned that his training lasted only 15 minutes. The company counter-argued that the co-worker who trained him was only a few feet away on each of the 4 days that he worked, and thus available for any retraining. All of the arbitrators on the panel felt that an investigation does not have to be 100 percent. A lesser investigation will not nullify the discipline when the employer’s reasons for the discharge (#1-#4) are as strong as they are here.