Spaulding Fibre Co., Inc.

SPAULDING FIBRE CO., INC. 237 union, a practice which the Committee said placed "a premium upon raiding and jurisdictional rivalries." It seems evident to me that the Petitioners here are attempting to do indirectly what they cannot do directly. Having failed to secure severance on the petitions of the IAM a few months ago, because of the American Potash rule, they now seek to accomplish the same re- sult via the decertification route. To permit existing appropriate units to be fragmentized by such maneuvers would indeed lead to anomolous results, and effectively circumvent the limitations on sev- erance recently established in the American Potash decision. SPAULDING FIBRE Co., INC. and LOCAL 586 , DISTRICT LODGE 76, INTER- NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF MACHINISTS , AFL, PETITIONER. Case No. 3-RC-1449. January 18,1955 Decision and Direction of Election Upon a petition duly filed under Section 9 (c) of the National La- bor Relations Act, a hearing was held before William G. McGee, hear- ing officer. The hearing officer's rulings made at the hearing are free from prejudicial error and are hereby affirmed. 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 Petitioner, and United Electrical, Radio and Machine Work- ers of America, Local 306, herein called the Intervenor, are labor or- ganizations claiming to represent certain employees of the Employer. 3. The contention of the Intervenor as to the existence of a contract bar in this case is without merit, as it appears in any event that the petition, filed on August 20, 1954, preceded in point of time the effec- tive date of the current contract on September 1, 1954. We find, ac- ^cordingly, that a question affecting commerce exists concerning 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 a unit of toolroom employees from the existing production and maintenance unit. In the alternative, the Petitioner requests a craft unit of all tool, die, or gauge makers and apprentices. The Employer and the Intervenor oppose the Petition- er's severance request on grounds that the unit sought is inappropriate. The Employer is engaged in the manufacture of hard vulcanized fibre and laminated thermo-setting plastics in the form of sheets, rods, and tubes and parts fabricated therefrom. The Intervenor was certi- fied by the Board in January 1944 as the collective-bargaining agent 111 NLRB No. 35. 238 DECISIONS OF NATIONAL LABOR RELATIONS BOARD of the Employer's production and maintenance employees, and since May 1944 has represented a unit of such employees under contract with the Employer. As of the hearing date, the Employer had on its payroll 950 production and maintenance employees, of whom 550 were employed in the fabricating department, otherwise known as the cut- ting room. The "tool room employees" primarily requested by the Petitioner are administratively included, and physically located within the fabricating department. There is, however, an identifiable toolroom area in which the toolroom employees in question, with their machines and equipment, are separately situated. The record is clear that the employees thus sought by the Petitioner, while broadly described as toolroom employees, consist of those employees, under the separate supervision of a toolroom foreman and his assistant, who work ex- clusively in building and repairing tools, dies, jigs, and fixtures used by the Employer in its fabrication operations. This proposed depart- mental unit encompasses the following employees : 45 tool, die, or gauge makers, 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th class; 1 toolroom rotary head milling machine operator; 1 toolroom jig bore operator; 1 leadman, tungsten carbide; 1 toolroom heat treater; 1 general department helper; 11 tool, die, or gauge apprentices; and 6 machinists, including 1 special lathe operator. One additional machinist, Leroy Rice, spends 50 percent of his time working on tools, dies, jigs, and fixtures under the supervision of the toolroom foreman, and the remainder of his time repairing machines under different supervision. There are also 3 tool crib attendants holding the classification of tool, die, or gauge maker apprentice, who are not under the supervision of the tool- room foreman, and who devote 65 percent of their time dispensing tools from the tool crib, which is about 60 feet removed from the tool- room area. Substantially the balance of the time of these three ap- prentices is spent sharpening Carboloy tools on sharpening machines located in the tool crib as well as in the toolroom area. The three apprentices distribute the tools from the tool crib to employees other than those in the toolroom area. There is, concededly, no issue as to the craft skill of the tool, die, or gauge makers and allied classifications constituting the predomi- nant part of the departmental unit requested by the Petitioner. Such employees use the customary machine and hand tools of their special craft, and in building and repairing the tools and dies required by the Employer, work to extremely close tolerances. The Employer hires experienced craftsmen from the outside, and also has an ap- prentice training program. The progression from apprentice to first-class tool, die, or gauge maker takes from 4 to 5 years. The tool- room employees receive relatively higher pay than other production and maintenance employees in the plant; they are not covered in the SPAULDING FIBRE CO., INC. 239 incentive pay system applicable to other employees in the fabricating department; and as a group they may from time to time be assigned different work schedules from other employees in the plant. Although under the contract between the Intervenor and the Em- ployer the toolroom employees in question are combined for seniority purposes with other employees in the fabricating department, the factor of ability to perform the particular work is accorded prece- dence by the Employer with respect to any prospective transfer, interchange, or "bumping" by nontoolroom employees into toolroom jobs. Such interchanges as have taken place in the past to and from toolroom jobs involved, in virtually all instances, only the apprentice classification. We reject as without merit the various contentions of the Employer and the Intervenor that the toolroom unit thus sought may not be appropriate. It is not material respecting the appropriateness of the departmental unit sought that the classification of machinist within the toolroom is duplicated elsewhere in the plant.' Concerning the four machinists in the fabricating department who are not under the supervision of the toolroom foreman, they make and repair parts for machines in the plant, and do not work, as do the toolroom ma- chinists, on tools, dies, jigs, and fixtures. In the maintenance ma- chine shop, which is a separate department, certain of the machinists perform work on post-forming dies, because there is no planer in the toolroom area with which to cut these large dies. However, such planing work does not require a high degree of skill. And, as it appears from the record, the work on dies performed by these main- tenance machinists is quantitatively insubstantial and only incidental to their main function of machining and assembling parts for new equipment. Post-forming dies which are worked upon outside the toolroom area are returned to the toolroom for completion. By con- trast, in 99 percent of the cases, the building and repairing of tools, dies, jigs, and fixtures are commenced and completed wholely within the toolroom. Similarily, although the profiler machine operator has as one of his functions the making and installing of jigs and fixtures, these jigs and fixtures pertain only to the machine he is op- erating, and this function is merely incidental to his principal duties. The appropriateness of a toolroom unit is not precluded by the fact that certain nontoolroom machinists and millwrights utilize, during a minor portion of their workday, some of the machines and equip- ment in the toolroom area. Nor is the integration of the toolroom functions with the processes in the fabricating department such as to 1 See Aine>ican Potash if Chemical Corporation, 107 NLRB 1418 Moe Light, Inc, 109 NLRB 1013, A P Controls Corporation, 108 NLRB 593 (Member Murdock who dissented on this point in the cited cases and who would in these circumstances grant severance only on a craft, as distinguished from a departmental basis, deems himself bound by the majority holdings in those cases). 240 DECISIONS OF NATIONAL LABOR RELATIONS BOARD militate against the finding of a functional toolroom department, as sought 2 We find, therefore, that the toolroom employees specified below comprise a functionally distinct and homogeneous departmen- tal group, who may, if they so desire, constitute a separate appropriate unit for collective-bargaining purposes.' In view of the evidence that machinist Leroy Rice spends 50 per- cent of his time on tools, dies, jigs, and fixtures under the toolroom foreman, we shall include him in the unit.4 However, we shall exclude the three tool crib attendants classified as apprentices, because the record shows that they are not for any part of their time under the supervision of the toolroom foreman and spend substantially all of their time in the tool crib away from the toolroom area performing functions which, for the most part, are unrelated to the toolroom processes. As the evidence establishes that the Petitioner is a labor organiza- tion which has traditionally served the special interests of such em- ployees, we shall permit the toolroom employees in the voting group, described below to determine whether they desire to be represented separately by the Petitioner. Accordingly, we shall direct that an election be held in the following voting group at the Employer's Tonawanda, New York, plant, excluding all other employees, and supervisors as defined in the Act : All tool, die, or gauge makers, 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th class, the tool- room rotary head milling machine operator; the toolroom jig bore operator; the leadman, tungsten carbide; the toolroom heat treater; the general toolroom department helper; the toolroom machinists under the supervision of the toolroom foreman, including the special toolroom lathe operator and Leroy Rice ; and the tool, die, or gauge maker apprentices under the supervision of the toolroom foreman, but excluding the tool crib attendants classified as tool, die, or gauge maker apprentices. If a majority vote for the Petitioner, they will be taken to have indi- cated their desire to be represented in a separate unit, and the Re- gional Director conducting the election directed herein is instructed, in that event, to issue a certification of representatives to the Peti- tioner for such unit, which the Board, under the circumstances, finds to be appropriate for purposes of collective bargaining. If, however, a majority vote for the Intervenor, they will be taken to have indi- cated their desire to remain part of the existing production and main- tenance unit, and the Regional Director is instructed to issue a certifi- cate of results of election to such effect. [Text of Direction of Election omitted from publication.] 2 See, e g, A P Controls Corporation, rabid. See American Potash & Chemical Corporation, supra ; Moe Light, Inc , supra. See Associated Business Service, 107 NLRB 219.