Raytheon Manufacturing Co.

RAYTHEON MANUFACTURING COMPANY 785 ployees, the clerical employee now located in the production area, professional employees, guards, foremen, and all supervisors as defined in the amended Act constitute a unit appropriate for purposes of collec- tive bargaining within the meaning of Section 9 (b) of the Act. [Text of Direction of Election omitted from publication in this volume.] RAYTHEON MANUFACTURING COMPANY and LODGE 1836 OF DISTRICT 38 OF THE INTERNATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF MACHINISTS, AFL, PETI- TIONER. Case No. I-RC-2230. March 20,19152 Decision and Direction of Election Upon a petition duly filed under Section 9 (c) of the National Labor Relations Act, a hearing was held before Leo J. Halloran, hear- ing officer. The hearing officer's rulings made at the hearing are free from prejudicial error and are hereby affirmed., Pursuant to the provisions of Section 3 (b) of the Act, the Board has delegated its powers in connection with this case to a three-mem- ber panel [Members Houston, Murdock, and Styles]. Upon the entire record in this case, the Board finds: 1. The -Employer is engaged in commerce within the meaning of the Act. 2. The labor organizations involved claim to represent certain employees of the Employer. 3. The Intervenor 2 and the Employer urge their current contract as a bar. The Intervenor was certified as bargaining representative for a production and maintenance unit in 1946,3 and contractual relations have continued on that basis to the present time. The most ' During the hearing, the Employer and the Intervenor requested permission to appeal directly to the Board from the hearing officer's rejection of the Intervenor's Exhibit No. 1 and offer of proof in connection therewith . The Board denied such permission, postponing a ruling on the question until this time . The rejected exhibit is a 1948 contract of indefinite duration between the Petitioner and the Intervenor in which the Petitioner' agreed not to file a petition for any unit other than a production and maintenance unit unless there occurred a substantial change in either the Employer 's method of operation of "the policy" of this Board . The Intervenor and the Employer now move that the Board overrule the hearing officer and admit the agreement into evidence. Relying on the Board's decision in Briggs Indiana Corporation, 63 NLRB 1270, they contend that this agreement should be considered a bar to the present petition . The motion is denied. In the Briggs Indiana case, the petitioner had made an agreement with the employer that it would not seek to represent a"specified group of employees for a 1-year period. The nature of the parties to the instant agreement , its vagueness , and its indefinite term all serve to dis- tinguish it from the contract which was before the Board in the Briggs case, and we do not regard that decision as applicable here. 2 Local 1505, International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, AFL. 3 66 NLRB 588. 98 NLRB No. 121. 786 DECISIONS OF NATIONAL LABOR RELATIONS BOARD recent contract was executed on June 29, 1950, effective from July 1, 1950, until June 30, 1951, to be automatically renewed from year to year unless termination notice was given not less than 60 days prior to the expiration date. However, this contract was amended on J anu- ary 22, 1951, by, among other things, extending the expiration date to June 30, 1952. The instant petition was filed on April 30, 1951. As the contract in question was prematurely extended, and the petition was timely with respect to the "Mill B" date of the original contract, the extended contract is not, under well-established Board policy, a bar. The parties to the contract contend, however, that the premature extension doctrine should not apply in this case because a representative of the Petitioner allegedly was a member of the committee which negotiated the extension. We do not agree. As the Board has said in previous decisions, the premature extension rule was necessitated by the-mandate of the statute guaranteeing freedom of choice of a bargaining representative to employees. It assures to them the right to challenge an incumbent union's representative status at predictable and reasonable intervals.4 Consequently, we do not believe that knowledge of, or even participa- tion by, any outside union in the premature extension of a contract should prevent the application of the premature extension rule. We therefore find th4 a question affecting commerce exists con- cerning the representation of employees of the Employer within the meaning of Section 9 (c) (1) and Section 2 (6) and (7) of the Act. 4. The Petitioner, seeks to sever from the existing production and maintenance unit a unit of all employees in the Employer's Massa- chusetts plants s classified as machinists, tool makers, tool grinders, and die makers; or, in the alternative, separate craft units of these employees, or any other craft group or combination thereof which the Board may deem appropriate. The Employer and the Inter- venor contend that the requested unit is inappropriate. The Employer is engaged at these plants in the manufacture of radar parts, power tubes, radio reception tubes, and various types of electronic equipment. The Employer employs over 9,000 workers, and has organized its production operations into three divisions, the 4 Celanese Corporation of America, 83 NLRB 103; Albion Malleable Iron Company, 90 NLRB 1640. We cannot agree with our dissenting colleague that the premature extension rule is directed solely against "misuse of the Board's protection of contracts ." The Board has consistently applied that doctrine even where the motives of the parties had nothing to do with attempting to freeze out rival unions. See, for example, National Gypsum Company, 96 NLRB 676. There the Board ( including our dissenting colleague ) specifically held that this doctrine is applicable even where the contracting parties have no knowledge of rival union activity at the time the contract is prematurely extended. 5 These plants are located in Waltham , Newton, Watertown , Quincy, Brighton, Bedford, and Boston . The plants are all reasonably close to each other and functionally related. No issue has been raised as to the multiplant scope of the unit. RAYTHEON MANUFACTURING 'COMPANY 787 power tube division, receiving tube division, and equipment division, and each division into several departments. While the Employer produces cathode ray and standard receiving tubes in quantity, a large part of its work is experimental and developmental high pre- cision work performed by the "job shop" method, chiefly for the United States Government. Because of the experimental nature of the work, the complexity of the products, and the precision required on the parts which go into them, the Employer employs a large number of highly skilled personnel in its production process, including a sub- stantial number whose work is that of-machinists and related trades. The employees sought by the Petitioner come, in the main, from this group. Of the approximately 410 employees in the unit requested by the Petitioner, about 142 are classified as machinists A, B, and C; 51 are experimental and development machinists A, B, and C ; 146 are tool makers; 39 are die makers; 29 are tool grinders; and the remaining 3 are classified as maintenance machinists. Some of these employees work in two toolrooms where they perform the usual functions of such departments, including the production and maintenance of tools, dies, and fixtures. The bulk of this group of employees, however, is scat- tered throughout the various development and production depart- ments where they work on the development, testing, and production of parts, and the assembly of the Employer's job-shop produced products. In considering whether the unit requested is appropriately severable from the existing over-all unit, we must at the outset reject the conten- tion of the Employer and the Intervenor that the National Tube and related decisions 6 prevent the severance of a craft unit in this case. We do not find in this case that degree of integration of operations, and the established pattern throughout the industry of collective bar- gaining on the basis of industrial units only, which was present and controlling in the cited cases; indeed, the Board has permitted craft severance in the radio and radio parts industry.' Thus, despite the history of bargaining on a broader basis, the severance of smaller units is appropriate in the Employer's plant provided that such units are truly craft in character or otherwise meet the Board's standards for severance. The theory of the Petitioner is that the employees in question con- stitute a homogeneous craft group. Voluminous evidence was intro- duced at the hearing both in support of and in opposition to this con- tention. We have examined all of this evidence with great care, and 6 National Tube Company, 76 NLRB 1199; Ford Motor Company, 78 NLRB 887; Permanente Metals Corp, 89 NLRB 804; Weyerhaeuser Timber Co., 87 NLRB 1076. ' Radio Corporation of America, 90 NLRB No. 220 ; The Crosley Corporation, 66 NLRB 849. 788 DECISIONS OF NATIONAL LABOR RELATIONS BOARD conclude that a preponderance of the evidence supports the position of the Petitioner. A prerequisite for the severance of an alleged craft group is that the employees involved possess and regularly utilize true craft skills. We believe that this test has been met in this case. There can be no doubt on the record as a whole that the experimental and development ma- chinists, the tool makers, and the die makers are highly skilled crafts- men, who are regularly required to utilize their craft skills in the, performance of their tasks. Together these three categories comprise more than half of the employees in the several machinist categories requested by the Petitioner. And while the two remaining cate- gories-the machinists and the tool grinders- are less skilled than the others in this group, the record indicates that they are nonetheless craftsmen, and, in any event, perform jobs from which employees regularly progress to the more highly skilled jobs." All employees in the unit sought perform nonrepetitive diversified work,9 within the ambit of their related machinist crafts.10 Although the Employer does not have a formal apprenticeship program, the record establishes that it hires employees for the categories in question who are already trained, or trains them for periods of as long as 8 years, promoting them step by step up through the range of machinist job categories. Nor do we find merit in the contention of the Employer and the In- tervenor that the group sought by the Petitioner is not severable because they do production work in large part, and work in proximity with other production employees who also frequently use the same machines as do the employees in question. Where true craftsmen utilize their craft skills in connection with their work their separate, representation is not precluded by the fact that their work may be immediately concerned with production 11 To, the extent that the employees in question here do production work, that work, as already noted, is highly specialized and nonroutine in character. :12 And while it is true that they may work in proximity with other production em- ployees, and may utilize certain of the same basic machines (when their work requires the use of machines), the record establishes that the e The machinists A, B, and C are listed in the current contract as the beginner categories for seniority purposes in all three trade classification groupings of die makers , experimen- tal and development machinists , and tool makers Tool grinders are rated between the highest and the lowest of the requested classifications. s Cf. Saco-Lowell Shops, 94 NLRB 647. It was contended that silver soldering, spinning, metal plating, and etching with acids, done by some of the included categories , are noncraft jobs. However, the record indicates that this Is high precision work done to extremely close tolerances and requires a great amount of skill. 11 The Baldwin Locomotive Works, 89 NLRB 403. 12 The Employer 's witnesses emphasized the infeasibility of using mass production methods, and stressed the fact that the great variety of intricate experimental products are made by the job-shop method See The Baldwin Locomotive Works, 89 NLRB 403. RAYTHEON MANUFACTURING COMPANY 789 employees outside of the requested unit who may perform related work have less training and fewer skills, are not required to work to as close tolerance, and, unlike the employees in the unit requested, per- form operations which are generally repetitive in character, confined to one machine 13 In sum, we are satisfied that the employees sought by the Petitioner comprise a highly skilled, homogeneous group of craftsmen engaged in the work of machinists and the related work of tool and die makers, and that they may, if they so desire, be represented in a separate unit 14 Accordingly, we shall direct an election in a voting group consisting of all of the Employer's employees classified as experimental and de- velopment machinists A, B, and C ; machinists A, B, and C ; mainte- nance machinists; die makers A, B, and C; tool makers A, B, and C; and tool grinders A, B, and C, excluding all other employees and super- visors as defined in the Act. If a majority vote for the Petitioner, they will be taken to have in- dicated their desire to constitute a separate appropriate unit, and the Regional Director conducting the election directed herein is instructed to issue a certificate of representatives to the Petitioner for the unit described above which the Board, under such circumstances, finds to be appropriate for the purposes of collective bargaining. In the event a majority vote for the Intervenor, the Board finds the existing unit to be appropriate and the Regional Director will issue a'certificate of results of election to such effect. [Text of Direction of "Election omitted from publication in this volume.] MEMBER MURDOCK, dissenting : I am unable to agree with the majority that the premature extension doctrine should be applied in this case to permit the Petitioner to upset the very contract it helped to negotiate. The purpose of the premature extension rule is to prevent representatives no longer commanding the support of employees from perpetuating their tenure by foreclosure of other petitions through misuse of the Board's protection of con- tracts.',' Clearly, the factual situation here does not involve an at- tempt to forestall a forthcoming petition. The Petitioner was the only other union interested in the employees at the time the extension agreement was executed. It was represented on the committee that negotiated that agreement and therefore had ample opportunity to file its petition before the agreement to which it gave its tacit-approval 11 General Electric Company, 89 NLRB 726, 737. 14 'United States Time Corporation, 95 NLRB 941; Sargent ct Company, 95 NLRB 1515. 15 See Wichita Union Stockyards Company, 40 NLRB 369. 998666-vol. 98-53--51 790 DECISIONS OF NATIONAL LABOR RELATIONS BOARD was executed. It chose, however, to accept for its constituents the wage benefits granted them under the extension agreement. Now it requests the Board to find that agreement not a bar to its petition. I would deny that request. In my opinion the Petitioner, having elected to accept the contract benefits, is estopped from seeking to invoke the premature extension rule as to that contract. Moreover, I am convinced that in this case the equities lie with the Employer, who agreed to certain wage demands made by the negotiating com- mittee comprised of representatives of the Intervenor and the Peti- tioner upon their assurance that at least temporary stability of labor management relationship at its plant be maintained. These circum- stances, in my opinion, create a valid exception to the premature extension rule."' 'a I agree that the contracting parties' knowledge or lack of knowledge of rival union activity at the time they entered into the extension agreement is immaterial with respect to the applicability of the premature extension doctrine. My position in this case does not turn upon such knowledge but upon the Petitioner 's participation in the negotiation of and acceptance of benefits under the extension agreement-facts which , in my opinion, clearly distinguish this case from the National Gypsum case cited in the majority opinion. THE TIMKEN-DETROIT AXLE COMPANY and INTERNATIONAL UNION, UNITED AUTOMOBILE, AIRCRAFT AND AGRICULTURAL IMPLEMENT WORKERS OF AMERICA, LOCAL No. 174, CIO, PETITIONER. Case No. 7-RC-1223. Maurer 21, 1952 Supplemental Decision and Order On August 22, 1951, pursuant to a Decision and Direction of Elec- tion issued by the Board herein on July 27, 1951,1 an election by secret ballot was conducted under the direction and supervision of the Acting Regional Director for the Seventh Region. At the conclusion of the election, the parties were furnished with a tally of ballots which shows that there were approximately 416 eligible voters and that 363 ballots were cast of which 154 were for the Petitioner, 205 were against the Petitioner, and 4 were challenged. Thereafter, the Petitioner filed timely objections to conduct affecting the results of the election. On October 1, 1951, the Acting Regional Director issued and served upon the parties his report on the objections to the election, in which he found that certain of the Petitioner's ob- jections raised substantial and material issues with respect to conduct affecting the results of the election and recommended that the election 1 95 NLRB 736. 98 NLRB No. 120.