Torres-Burgos v. Crowley Liner Service, Inc. ( 2021 )

United States Court of Appeals
For the First Circuit
No. 19-2083
MIGUEL A. TORRES-BURGOS,
Plaintiff, Appellant,
v.
CROWLEY LINER SERVICE, INC.,
Defendant, Appellee.
APPEAL FROM THE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT
FOR THE DISTRICT OF PUERTO RICO
[Hon. Jay A. Garcia-Gregory, U.S. District Judge]
Before
Howard, Chief Judge,
Thompson and Barron, Circuit Judges.
Fredeswin Pérez-Caballero, with whom Pérez-Caballero Law
Office was on brief, for appellant.
Raquel M. Dulzaides, with whom Edgardo A. Vega López and
Jiménez, Graffam & Lausell were on brief, for appellee.
April 29, 2021
BARRON, Circuit Judge. In this appeal, Miguel Torres-
Burgos ("Torres") contends that the United States District Court
for the District of Puerto Rico erred in granting summary judgment
to his former employer on his challenge to an arbitral award in
favor of the employer. In that arbitral award, the arbitrator had
found that the employer's summary dismissal of Torres from his job
violated neither its collective bargaining agreement with his
union nor a Puerto Rico law that protects employee rights. We
affirm.
I.
Torres had been an employee of Crowley Liner Service,
Inc. ("Crowley"), a maritime shipping company, since 1994. In
2015, Torres was an office clerk for Crowley's Car Division in San
Juan, Puerto Rico. But, Crowley summarily dismissed Torres from
this job on June 25, 2015.
At the time, Torres was a member of Unión de Tronquistas
de Puerto Rico, Local 901 (the "Union"), which had entered into a
Collective Bargaining Agreement ("CBA") with Crowley. The CBA
provided, among other things, that an employee of Crowley may be
summarily dismissed from employment for "offering false
information with the purpose of defrauding the Company or the
customers of the Company." Article XV, § 1 of the CBA.
Torres challenged the dismissal through the Union
pursuant to Article XIII, § 2 of the CBA by filing a complaint and
- 2 -
submitting the grievance to arbitration at the Puerto Rico
Department of Labor and Human Resources. He did so on the ground
that he had not offered "false information with the purpose of
defrauding the Company or the customers of the Company," Article
XV, § 1 of the CBA, and thus that the summary dismissal violated
the CBA as well as Puerto Rico's Wrongful Discharge Statute ("Law
80"), which requires that summary dismissals be based on just
cause, see P.R. Laws Ann. tit. 29, §§ 185a-185n.
The arbitration hearing took place on April 27, 2017.
Torres's direct supervisor, Jorge Escoda-Santiago ("Escoda"),
testified on behalf of Crowley at the hearing. In his testimony,
he stated that he had asked Torres on June 24, 2015, whether
Torres's work was up to date, and that Torres had claimed that it
was. But, Escoda further testified, he later found three days'
worth of unprocessed documents in Torres's desk.
Torres also testified at the arbitration hearing. He
did not dispute in his testimony that the unprocessed documents
had been found in his desk. Rather, he testified that he had been
the victim of a conspiracy and denied hiding the documents at
issue.
On July 17, 2018, the arbitrator issued an arbitral award
dismissing Torres's complaint. The arbitrator found that Escoda's
testimony was credible, but that Torres's was not. On that basis,
- 3 -
the arbitrator ruled that the summary dismissal comported with
Article XV, § 1 of the CBA and also with Law 80.
Torres then filed a petition for judicial review of the
arbitration award in a local Puerto Rico court. Crowley removed
the case to the United States District Court for the District of
Puerto Rico, and the District Court thereafter granted Crowley's
motion for summary judgment and dismissed Torres's petition for
judicial review. Torres timely appealed.
II.
Torres contends that we must reverse the District
Court's grant of summary judgment to Crowley because the
arbitrator's ruling was in manifest disregard of the law.1
Reviewing the decision of the District Court de novo, see Cytyc
Corp. v. Deka Prods. Ltd. P'ship, 439 F.3d 27, 32 (1st Cir. 2006),
we conclude that there is no merit to this contention, even
assuming that an arbitral ruling may be overturned on such a
ground, see Hall St. Assocs. v. Mattel, Inc., 552 U.S. 576, 585
(2008) (questioning whether the doctrine of "manifest disregard of
the law" provides an independent ground for vacating an arbitration
award separate from the grounds enumerated in the Federal
Arbitration Act); Mountain Valley Prop., Inc. v. Applied Risk
1 Because Torres does not challenge the District Court's
holding that he must pay Crowley's litigation costs pursuant to
Article XIII, § 8 of the CBA, we consider that issue waived.
- 4 -
Servs., Inc., 863 F.3d 90, 94-95 (1st Cir. 2017) (assuming arguendo
the common-law doctrine's continued validity where no manifest
disregard of the law occurred).
Torres first argues that the arbitrator manifestly
disregarded Article XV, § 1 of the CBA by ruling for Crowley after
merely finding that Torres had acted dishonestly and without also
finding that he had done so "with the aim of defrauding the
Company." But, at the beginning of his written ruling, the
arbitrator quoted the relevant provision of the CBA in its
entirety, and, near the end of the ruling, the arbitrator
reiterated that provision by stating: "Article XV, Disciplinary
Actions, Section 1 of the Collective Bargaining Agreement between
Crowley and the Union establishes a list of reasons why an employee
would be summarily terminated. These include offering false
information with the aim of defrauding the Company or the customers
of the Company." (emphasis added). The arbitrator then concluded
that this provision had been satisfied because "the
complainant . . . lied to his supervisor." Thus, read as a whole,
the arbitrator's written ruling does not support Torres's
contention that the arbitrator failed to find that Torres had lied
with the purpose of defrauding Crowley. See Ebbe v. Concorde Inv.
Servs., LLC, 953 F.3d 172, 177 (1st Cir. 2020) (finding no manifest
disregard of the law where there was "no showing that 'the
arbitrator recognized the applicable law, but ignored it'"
- 5 -
(quoting Raymond James Fin. Servs., Inc. v. Fenyk, 780 F.3d 59, 64
(1st Cir. 2015))).
Torres also argues that the record developed at the
hearing before the arbitrator sets forth no facts that could
support a finding that he aimed to defraud Crowley, even if he had
been dishonest, and that for this reason, too, the arbitrator
manifestly disregarded the relevant provision of the CBA in finding
that the summary dismissal comported with it. But here, again, we
disagree.
In pressing this aspect of his challenge, Torres appears
to be relying on the same premise on which he relied below -- that
there needed to be evidence that he made "[a]n intentional
misrepresentation to deceive another into surrendering money" to
support a finding that he offered "false information with the
purpose of defrauding" Crowley. But, even if we were to accept
that premise, the arbitrator found that Torres had, during the
course of his employment, hidden three days' worth of work in his
drawer and then lied to his supervisor that his work was up to
date. Thus, the evidence sufficed to support a finding that Torres
had made an "intentional misrepresentation" about the state of his
work "to deceive" Crowley "into surrendering money" to him by
continuing to pay him a salary.
Finally, Torres argues that the arbitrator manifestly
disregarded the law based on Law 80, which Torres contends
- 6 -
separately barred Crowley from summarily dismissing him based on
dishonesty alone and in the absence of his having acted dishonestly
with the aim of defrauding the company.2 But, even if we were to
assume that Torres was right about what Law 80 requires, this
contention about how the arbitrator manifestly disregarded the law
fails for the same reasons that his similar challenge based on the
CBA fails: the evidence did suffice to support a finding that he
had lied to his supervisor with the aim of defrauding the company.
III.
For the reasons that we have given, the order granting
summary judgment is affirmed.
2 Torres nowhere contends that the CBA or Puerto Rico law
required any misrepresentation made with the requisite intent to
be a material one. Accordingly, he argues neither that the
arbitrator overlooked any such requirement nor that the evidence
was insufficient to support a finding of materiality.
- 7 -