1 - National Labor Relations Board

Representation Cases 57
scale, had separate locker facilities, and worked different shifts.
No other employees operated turbines or heavy machinery. The
only work which the powerhouse employees performed outside
the powerplant was preventive maintenance or repair work related
to powerhouse equipment. In these circumstances, and in
the absence of a bargaining history in a broader unit, the Board
concluded that the powerhouse employees could either form a
separate unit or be included in a broader unit of all service and
maintenance employees. Accordingly, it directed a self-determination
election among them.
On the other hand, in a case 41 involving a lumber and plywood
plant, initial establishment of a separate unit of maintenance
employees was denied. The Board noted that while, under the
principles announced in Mallinckrodt, 42 the pattern of plantwide
bargaining in the basic lumber industry—which had brought
substantial stability in labor relations—and the integrated nature
of operations in the industry were no longer sufficient to render
separate maintenance units inappropriate in all cases, they remained
valid factors to be considered and weighed in making
unit findings. In this case it concluded that other factors precluded
the appropriateness of a separate maintenance unit. The
Board pointed out that production and maintenance employees
enjoyed a common wage structure and the same fringe benefits
and the majority of the maintenance employees spent most of
their time on the production floor working with production employees
under the supervision of production foremen. The maintenance
employees also frequently substituted on production jobs,
were recruited largely from the production ranks, and could
bump back to production work in the event of a layoff. Accordingly,
the Board concluded that any separate community of interests
which the maintenance employees might enjoy by reason
of their skills and training had been largely submerged in the
broader community of interests which they shared with other
employees, and they could not therefore form a separate appropriate
unit.43
41u S. Plywood—Champton Papere, 174 NLRB No. 48.
4' Mallinckrodt Chemical Works, Uranium Div., 162 NLRB 387 (1966).
" Chairman McCulloch and Members Brown and Jenkins for the majority. Members Fanning
and Zagoria, dissenting, would find the maintenance employees a readily identifiable group
whose similarity of skills and functions created a community of interest warranting separate
representation. In their view, the case was indistinguishable from Crown Simpson Pulp Co.,
163 NLRB 796 (1967), where the Board found a separate unit of maintenance employees at
a pulp mill appropriate Member Fanning also viewed the majority's decision as resurrecting
the absolute prohibition of separate craft units in the basic lumber industry established in
Weyerhaeuser Timber Co., 87 NLRB 1076 (1949), and overruled in Mallinckrodt Chemical
Works, 162 NLRB 387 (1966).