Weyerhaeuser Timber Co.

In the Matter Of WEYERHAEUSER TIMBER COMPANY, EMPLOYER and CHAUFFEURS, TEAMSTERS AND HELPERS UNION, LOCAL No. 252, AFL, PETITIONER Case No. 19RC-302.Decided January 17,1950 DECISION AND ORDER Upon a petition duly filed, a hearing was held before Hubert J. Merrick, hearing officer of the National Labor Relations Board. The hearing officer's rulings made at the hearing are free from prejudicial error and are hereby affirmed. At the close of the hearing, the Inter- venor moved to dismiss the petition. For reasons stated hereinafter under paragraph numbered three, the motion is granted' Upon the entire record in this case, the Board finds : 1. The Employer is engaged in commerce within the meaning of the National Labor Relations Act. 2. The labor organizations involved claim to represent employees of the Employer.2 3. No question affecting commerce exists concerning the representa- tion of employees of the Employer within the meaning of Section 9 (c) (1) and Section 2 (6) and (7) of the Act, for the following reasons: The Petitioner requests that a unit of all log and dump truck drivers at the Vail-McDonald branch of the Employer be found appropriate for the purposes of collective bargaining.s The Employer and the ' The Employer's request for oral argument is denied inasmuch as we believe the issues and positions of the parties were adequately presented in the record and the briefs and for the further reason that the central issue herein was recently argued before the Board in Weyerhaeuser Timber Company ( Springfield Lumber Division), 87 NLRB 106, and Nettleton Timber Company, 87 NLRB 139. 1International Woodworkers of America , Local 2191 , and Local 3-306 , CIO, herein collectively referred to as the Intervenor, appeared at the hearing and were granted intervention by the hearing officer on the basis of sufficient contractual interest. 3 The Petitioner indicated at the hearing that it would accept as an alternative to the single unit of all truck drivers , two separate units consisting respectively , of the drivers at Vail and the operators at Doty and :McDonald . The Intervenor at the present time represents all production and maintenance employees , including the truck drivers, in two units corresponding to the division referred to by the Petitioner . In view of our findings herein as to the inappropriateness of severance of log and dump truck drivers, we feel it unnecessary to consider the alternate unit advanced by the Petitioner. 88 NLRB No. 36. 155 156 DECISIONS OF NATIONAL LABOR RELATIONS BOARD Intervenor, however, contend that the proposed unit is inappropriate on the grounds that the prior bargaining history, the skills of the drivers and their integration into the essential production processes of the plant, are all inconsistent with severance of these employees from the existing bargaining units. ,The Vail-McDonald branch is one of .the Employer's numerous logging and sawmill plants in the Pacific Northwest . The operations concerned herein are conducted at Vail, McDonald, and Doty, in the State of Washington .' At'these camps, the Employer is primarily engaged in logging, and the timber is.eventually shipped to its mill at Everett, Washington, for further processing into lumber and pulp. Headquarters for the branch and the main buildings are located at Vail with a few maintenance shops and an office at McDonald and a small maintenance building at. the Doty area . Approximately Z35 production and maintenance employees are presently utilized in the. operations. Of these, 360 are at Vail and the remainder divided- between the other 2 camps. Prior to 1945, the Employer used rail transport. to move the cut timber from the logging camps to the mill. In that year, however, the first log truck was placed in service and at the present time 20 log and dump trucks are in operation at Vail and McDonald and approxi- mately14 trucks at Doty. The Employer, at the time of the hearing, employed 35 log truck drivers, 2 standby drivers for log trucks, and 10 dump truck operators. At Vail' and McDonald the drivers are under the supervision of the truck foreman who reports to the camp logging superintendent. There is occasional interchange between the log and dump truck operators and fequent interchange between camps. The log trucks are in operation over company-built and -maintained roads and transport the felled timber from loading stations in the woods to reload stations on a railway spur. At McDonald, the trucks haul for a distance of 3.7 miles, at Doty, 1.4 miles, and at Vail, for 11.8 miles. The dump trucks are used primarily in the construction of logging roads and their maintenance. The working conditions and interests of the truck drivers do not appear to be essentially different from those of other production and maintenance employees at this plant. The drivers are paid on the same hourly basis, have the same hours of work, overtime provisions, seniority system and grievance machinery, hiring procedure, ultimate supervision, plant and safety rules, and accident and hospital plans as other employees at these operations. Bunkhouse, food, and living accommodations are the same for all employees. Some interchange between the drivers and production and maintenance workers occurs on occasions when a reduction in the crew of drivers is made necessary WEYERHAEUSER TIMBER COMPANY 157 by weather or operating difficulties, in which event, the drivers are assigned to other jobs. As noted previously, the Intervenor has con- tractually represented all production and maintenance employees at the Vail-McDonald branch including the truck drivers for the past 12 years. In prior cases concerning this issue, we have found that skilled employees in the lumber industry such as the drivers concerned herein, have- historically and technologically deviated from the set patterns of craft work and training to the more flexible status of highly quali- fied specialists. We discern no important difference in the situation presented in the record herein from our earlier decisions. Accord- ingly, in light of the integration of the truck drivers with the Em- ployer's production processes, the historical pattern of bargaining in the lumber industry and at this branch, and the resulting mutuality of interests and working conditions of all employees, we believe that a unit confined to all truck drivers at the Employer's Vail-McDonald branch is inappropriate for the purposes of collective bargaining.' We shall therefore dismiss the petition. ORDER IT IS HEREBY ORDERED that the petition filed in Case No. 19-RC-302, be, and it hereby is, dismissed. MEMBER MuRDocK took no part in the consideration of the above Decision and Order. 4 See Weyerhaeuser Timber Company (Springfield Lumber Division ), 87 NLRB 1076; Nettleton Timber Company, 87 NLRB 1319, and cases cited therein.