1 - National Labor Relations Board

148 Thirty-fourth Annual Report of the National Labor Relations Board -
were represented in two separate bargaining units by two different
locals of the same international union merged with another
company, almost all of whose employees were also members of
one of these locals. That local, which had continually protested
the assignment of employees represented by the other local to
perform work which it contended was within its jurisdiction,
forced some of those employees to transfer their membership to
it and to go to the bottom of the seniority list in order to continue
to perform such work. The Seventh Circuit 59 sustained the Board's
finding that this denial of seniority did not violate the Act, since
it was based, not on the employees' former membership in another
union, but on their former membership in another bargaining
unit. While the employees had been working for the same employer,
and doing the same kind of work as those already in the
bargaining unit, the local's constant protests against this infringement
on its unit jurisdiction preserved the status of the
two locals along unit lines.
The court pointed out that seniority rights are not vested, but
derive their scope and significance from union contracts. In its
view, a bargaining representative need not base seniority rights
solely upon the relative lengths of employment of the respective
employees ; it may also consider such variables as the nature of
the work or departmental membership. In any event, seniority
is a valid subject matter for the collective-bargaining process,
and a collective-bargaining representative should be given broad
discretion to bargain with respect to seniority rights, subject
only to complete good faith and honesty of purpose in the exercise
of such discretion. The court noted that the existence of differences
in the manner and degree to which the terms of a negotiated
agreement affect individual employees or classes of employees is
inevitable and should not invalidate the agreement in the absence
of proof that the differences resulted from hostile discrimination.
Finding that the record before it established that the denial of
seniority resulted, not from arbitrary discrimination, but from
the union's need to protect the integrity of the bargaining unit
which it represented, the court affirmed the Board's order.
In another case, 6° a local union and an employer, parties to a
contract which covered both carpenters and millwrights, executed
a new contract after the international union chartered a new
local to represent millwrights. In the new contract the trade
n Schick [Teamsters Locals 705 and 710] v. N.L.R.B., 409 F.2d 395. affg. Transport Motor
Express, 162 NLRB 1023.
0 N.L.R.B. v. Consolidated Constructors & Builders, 406 F.2d 1081.