Atlantic Richfield Co.

142 DECISIONS OF NATIONAL LABOR RELATIONS BOARD Atlantic Richfield Company and Oil Chemical and Atomic Workers International Union, AFL - CIO-CLC, Petitioner. Case 4-RC-10353 January 4, 1974 DECISION AND ORDER BY CHAIRMAN MILLER AND MEMBERS JENKINS AND KENNEDY Upon a petition duly filed under Section 9(c) of the National Labor Relations Act, as amended, a hearing in this case was held before Hearing Officer Francis W. Hoeber on June 12, 13, 14, and 15, 1973. Following the hearing, and pursuant to Section 102.67 of the National Labor Relations Board Rules and Regulations and Statements of Procedure, Series 8, as amended, this case was transferred to the National Labor Relations Board for decision. Pursuant to the provisions of Section 3(b) of the National Labor Relations Act, as amended, the National Labor Relations Board has delegated its authority in this proceeding to a three-member panel. The Board has reviewed the Hearing Officer's rulings made at the hearing and finds that they are free from prejudicial error. The rulings are hereby affirmed.' Upon the entire record in this case, including the briefs filed by the Employer, Petitioner, and Interve- nor,2 the Board finds: The Petitioner seeks to represent a unit of about 2,200 employees of the Employer consisting of all hourly employees at its Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, refinery, Product Quality, Research and Develop- ment, Philadelphia, Supply and Transportation (Marine), and Marketing, excluding salaried employ- ees, professionals, guards, and supervisors. In the alternative, Petitioner will accept two units, one consisting of hourly production and maintenance employees at the Philadelphia refinery and related facilities, and a second consisting of hourly employ- ees in marketing. As a third alternative, Petitioner will accept a unit, or units, which includes salaried employees who are not office clerical. In effect, Petitioner seeks to represent a single-facility unit limited to the Employer's Philadelphia refinery. The Employer and Intervenor contend that none of the units requested by Petitioner may be established as there is an established historical multiplant bargain- 1 At the hearing, the Petitioner was permitted, over objections, to amend its petition in a manner which adds several hundred employees and deletes several hundred others from a unit which it seeks to represent In their respective briefs, both the Employer and the Intervenor contend that the amendment should not have been allowed because it was too extensive in scope to be considered as an amendment to the petition. This contention is without ment Under Sec. 101.18(a) of the National Labor Relations Board Rules and Regulations, a petition may be amended during the hearing at the ing unit which extends to 15 States and which is represented by the Intervenor under a current national multiplant 2-year contract that came into effect between the Employer and Intervenor on July 1, 1971. On the foregoing basis, the Employer and the Intervenor move for the dismissal of the petition. The Petitioner opposes this motion to dismiss and asserts that the Employer has not been bargaining with Intervenor on an extensive multiplant unit basis, but rather on a multilocation basis involving six independent bargaining units, each covered by its own individual contract. In this regard, the record reveals that in addition to the above multiplant contract expiring June 30, 1973, the Employer and the Intervenor have also negotiated six supplemental agreements relative to special local problems among six groups of employees. It is these latter six documents on which the Petitioner now grounds an argument that the Employer and the Intervenor have not effectively established a multiplant unit because, the Petitioner claims, the basic contract is only general and superficial whereas the real terms and conditions of employment are set forth in the six supplemental agreements.3 As appears from the above, Petitioner does not dispute the existence of a long history of collective bargaining between the Employer and Intervenor on a multistate multiplant basis encompassing, among others, the unit(s) sought by the Petitioner. Nor is there any question that the current contract defines the unit covered as a single, 15-state multiplant unit. Petitioner's major claim appears to be, however, that the terms and conditions contained in the above multiplant contract are not sufficiently extensive to render the overall historical unit controlling. We do not agree. The Employer, a Pennsylvania corporation with headquarters in Los Angeles, California, is engaged in the production, refining, sales, and distribution of crude oil, petroleum products, and petrochemicals in several States. The current organization of the Employer is a result of the merger of the Atlantic- Refining Company with the Richfield Oil Company in 1966 and the Sinclair Oil Company in 1969. Its operations are organized on a functional basis, the same as it was under its predecessor, the Atlantic Refining Company. The latter recognized the In- tervenor as the representative of its employees at least 35 years ago. Presently, out of some 27,000 discretion of the Hearing Officer upon such terms as he deems just. Moreover, no party was prejudiced by the amendment. 2 The Atlantic Independent Union was allowed to intervene on the basis of a contractual relationship with the Employer as the longstanding bargaining representative of many of its employees. 3 The employees sought by the Petitioner in its amended petition are those who are covered by only two of these six supplemental agreements. 208 NLRB No. 57 ATLANTIC RICHFIELD CO. employees of the Atlantic Richfield Company, 5,300 are represented by the Intervenor, all of whom, but for 280 former Sinclair employees, work in those divisions which were formerly the old Atlantic Refining Company. The record shows that, since 1938, the Intervenor has represented the Employer's employees in a single multiplant unit under a series of master contracts negotiated and executed periodically at the Employ- er's headquarters. Oftentimes, the master contracts were followed by supplemental agreements entered into between the Intervenor and the Employer to meet local needs of specified groups of employees. The 1971-73 national agreement placed in evi- dence and the record as a whole establish that such matters as pensions, employer contributions to medical plans, a general percentage wage increase, deduction of union dues, and certain other economic items are negotiated on an overall basis. In addition, grievance, layoff, and seniority provisions are con- tained in the national contract. On the other hand, other economic items, such as the medical insurance carrier, uniform allowances, local wage differentials, meal allowances, and mileage allowances, are part of the supplemental agreements. Negotiation sessions for the national agreement take place in Philadelphia. The Employer is repre- sented by members of management designated by its president. The Intervenor is represented by the Executive Board of the Union, which consists of 4 national officers and 15 local representatives.4 The ratification of the national agreement is effected only on a unitwide basis by mailing ratification notices to all employees represented by the Intervenor. The ballots, which are color coded to correspond to the Unit Councils, are thereafter returned by each employee to a national organiza- tion of the Intervenor whose function is to handle referendums and elections. Subsequently, the votes are sorted out and tabulated on a Unit Council basis, with the decision by the majority of the 11 Unit Councils determining the fate of the agreement. The majority vote of the 11 Unit Councils put together is final and binding on all members of the Union irrespective of the particular votes of the individual employees or Unit Councils. Supplemental agreements result from negotiations between the representatives of the Employer and the individual Unit Council of the affected employees. It appears, however, that at these local negotiations two or more national officers of the Intervenor are 4 The president of the Union is the chairman of the Intervenor's negotiating committee The other national officers of the Union are the vice president, the secretary, and the treasurer. For administrative convenience , the Intervenor is organized into what it calls Unit Councils, each representing more or less a subdivision of Employer's operations. There are I I such Unit Councils Functionally, a 143 always present and participate in the negotiations on behalf of the Unit Council involved. Ratification of such supplemental agreements is made by the employees within the affected Unit Council. In addition, the method of settling employee grievances, which is provided by the national agreement and used by the parties, also indicates that the Employer and the Intervenor intended to negotiate on the basis of, and have established, a single, overall multiplant bargaining unit. In this regard, the respective Unit Councils may process the grievances of their member employees through the first four levels of the grievance procedure estab- lished by the national agreement. Beyond the fourth level, a persisting grievance must go before a national group, the Arbitration Review Committee, who subsequently sends its recommendation to the Executive Board. The Executive Board, and not the Unit Councils, has the ultimate authority to decide what cases go to arbitration. The only strike in the Intervenor's long history of collective bargaining with the Employer occurred in January 1971. The record shows that the issue of whether the Union was to strike or not was also decided on the basis of overall unit referendum, almost in the same general manner as the foregoing ratification of the national agreement was handled. However, even though the overall vote, as to whether or not to strike, favored striking, the employees in those Unit Councils that voted to strike largely refrained from going to work, whereas the employees in those Unit Councils that voted against striking largely continued to work. The Petitioner claims that this action on the part of the Unit Councils is illustrative of the autonomy and independence of the Unit Councils and therefore is supportive of its major contention that the Employer and the Interve- nor have in effect maintained not a single, overall multiplant unit but rather six different bargaining units. However, we are not persuaded that the failure of some employees to honor a majority decision made by their union following a unitwide referen- dum necessarily evidences the existence of multiple bargaining units. We are especially impressed by the record evidence which shows that such failure was not widespread among employees represented by the Union; that it took place during the only strike in the over 30-year history of representation by the Union; and that, above all, the actions of the employees did not engulf the entire members of any one given Unit Council, but rather that, while some employees from Unit Council is an administrative group of employees within the Union who are elected to office by the general membership of the Union within a given local or an operational subdivision of the Employer. The chairman of each of these Unit Councils and 4 additional representatives from Unit Council #2 constitute the 15 local representative members of the Executive Board. 144 DECISIONS OF NATIONAL LABOR RELATIONS BOARD any one given Unit Council disregarded the national vote and went to work , some others of the same Unit Council honored the strike vote of the Union, thus rendering the incident almost insignificant on the subject matter of unit determination. Such factors as there are which might tend to support the Petitioner's contentions that the parties' bargaining relationship has not been conducted on the basis of a single multiplant unit are outweighed, in our opinion, by the long continuous bargaining history, and the manner of negotiation. execution, coverage, and application of the agreements between the parties on a single, 15-state, multiplant unit basis. We conclude that the record establishes the existence of a controlling history of multiplant bargaining which has resulted in the establishment of the single 5 In this regard we note the reference in the national agreement to Unit Councils, each of which in fact represents the employees described in and covered under each of six supplemental agreements, negotiation of such supplemental agreements on the local level as discussed above, and the fact that any of the six supplemental agreements may be opened for negotiations at any time by employees affected thereunder The Board has frequently held, however, that negotiation of supplemental agreements on a local basis, multiplant unit covered by the existing national agreement and embracing all of the 5,300 employees represented by the Intervenor including the approxi- mately 2,200 employees sought by the Petitioner. Accordingly, as the Petitioner in this case requests elections in units limited to only a portion of the unit covered by the national agreement, the units sought are too narrow in scope and therefore inappropriate for purposes of collective bargaining. We shall therefore dismiss the petition herein.6 ORDER It is further ordered that the petition filed herein be, and it hereby is, dismissed. for strictly local problems, and reference in national agreements to "units" are not inconsistent with a finding of multiplant bargaining See General Motors Corporation, Cadillac Motor Car Division, 120 NLRB 1215, 1220, 1221 See also St Regis Paper Company, 97 NLRB 1051, 1056, The Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company, 105 NLRB 674. 6 Cf Si Regis Paper Company, 101 NLRB 656