Operations In Fiscal Year 1988 - National Labor Relations Board

102 Fifty-Third Annual Report of the National Labor Relations Board.Soon thereafter, a group of retirees angrily demanded accessto and use of a meeting room for the AR. Concurrently, Evansappeared at the ALC with a group of individuals, some of whomwere unidentified P-9 members. Kimbro adhered to his refusal to -permit the retirees the use of the meeting room. He also told-Evans that Murphy had returned to Washington, D.C., and wasnot there to answer questions. For 10 minutes Evans stoodamong those at the side doorway and engaged Kimbro in angryconversation while a vituperative crowd of 50-60 persons shoutedinsults at the trustee's representatives. At one point, ARmember Raymond Arens prevented Kimbro from closing thedoor. When police, summoned by the UFCW officials, arrived,AR President Rogers felt constrained to calm the crowd because"We didn't need any people in jail." The two police officers, theUFCW agents, NAMPU's Evans, and the AR representativesthen ended the incident by leaving the ALC for a meeting elsewhere.The administrative law judge found that the mass demonstrationwas no more "than a brief boisterous expression of frustrationand exasperation." He therefore concluded that the GeneralCounsel had not met the burden of proving that the protesters'conduct was unlawfully coercive. However, a panel majority ofthe Board disagreed.The majority held that under the circumstances 'here, notingparticularly "the acrimonious union factionalism" that had developedduring Local P-9's extended strike against Hormel, the actof massing a hostile crowd before a small door to confront andinsult rival union officials, and to prevent closing that door,"would reasonably tend to coerce and threaten employees fromengaging in protected activities in support of the Local P-9 trusteeship."This is particularly true where, as here, the misconductdirected against nonemployee third parties became or was sure tobecome known to employees, the majority noted. The fact thatthere was no physical violence or property damage, or that theprotesters did not actually prevent anyone from passing throughtheir midst, was not considered to be legally significant. Moreover,the majority added, the misconduct here was indistinguishablefrom the type of conduct that, as previously engaged in bysuspended P-9 officers and their agents, had been enjoined by aFederal district court order.The panel majority further found that the conduct of Evansand the other participants in the mass demonstration was attributableto Respondent NAMPU. As stated by the judge, Evans was"a well recognized and vociferously active agent of NAMPU."Independent of the retirees, who had their own representative(Rogers) during the events at issue, Evans, as NAMPU's chartermember and organizer, assumed the role of leader and spokespersonfor the nonretiree P-9 members who opposed the trusteeship