Coastal Oil v. Teamsters ( 1998 )

UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS
FOR THE FIRST CIRCUIT
No. 97-1950
COASTAL OIL OF NEW ENGLAND, INC.,
Plaintiff, Appellant,
v.
TEAMSTERS LOCAL A/W
INTERNATIONAL BROTHERHOOD OF TEAMSTERS,
Defendant, Appellee.
APPEAL FROM THE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT
FOR THE DISTRICT OF MASSACHUSETTS
[Hon. Reginald C. Lindsay, U.S. District Judge]
Before
Torruella, Chief Judge,
Campbell, Senior Circuit Judge,
and Lynch, Circuit Judge.
Alan S. Miller, with whom Stoneman, Chandler & Miller LLP
was on brief for appellant.
Christine L. Nickerson, with whom Matthew E. Dwyer and Dwyer
& Jenkins, P.C. were on brief for appellee.
January 23, 1998
TORRUELLA, Chief Judge. Although this appeal presents
TORRUELLA, Chief Judge.
a somewhat novel question, the answer is more mundane.
Appellant employer Coastal Oil of New England, Inc.,
filed an Application to Vacate an arbitration award in the
Superior Court of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts on the
grounds that the arbitrator had exceeded his authority. Appellee
labor organization Teamsters Local Union No. 25 A/W International
Brotherhood of Teamsters removed the matter to the United States
District Court for the District of Massachusetts. See 28 U.S.C.
1441, 1331; 29 U.S.C. 185(a). Both parties filed cross
motions for summary judgment, whereupon the court ruled against
appellant and denied vacation of the arbitration award. Instead,
the district court granted appellee's request that the award be
enforced. Final judgment was entered thereafter and this appeal
followed.
Appellant operates three separate facilities in
Massachusetts, including one in Revere and one in Chelsea.
Although they are all represented for collective bargaining
purposes by appellee, the employees in each of the three
facilities belong to separate bargaining units and are covered by
discrete collective bargaining agreements.
Joseph Abruzzese, a yardman within the Revere
bargaining unit, was injured in a work-related accident in 1991,
forcing him to take a leave of absence, during which he received
benefits under the Massachusetts Worker's Compensation Act.
Mass. Gen. Laws ch. 152, 1 et seq. In August 1995, when
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Abruzzese sought to return to work, no job openings were
available in the Revere unit. Nevertheless, appellant and
appellee reached an agreement that Abruzzese would be reinstated
to the next available position. Subsequently, Abruzzese learned
that a yardman position was available in the Chelsea unit, the
same job that he had previously had in the Revere unit. He
applied for that slot through his union, appellee. Appellant
refused the request, contending that Abruzzese only had a right
to reinstatement in the Revere unit. After appellant hired
someone else to the Chelsea position, appellee filed a grievance
pursuant to the Revere contract.
Eventually, the dispute was heard before an arbitrator.
After hearing the evidence, the arbitrator concluded that the
issue to be decided was "whether the Company violated the
[Revere] Agreement when it refused to place Joseph Abruzzese . .
. in a position of yardman at the Company's Chelsea terminal . .
. ." Thereafter, the arbitrator concluded that Article XIV,
Section 10(a) of the Revere Agreement, which incorporated the
Massachusetts Worker's Compensation Law, mandated the employment
of Abruzzese at the open position in Chelsea. Appellant was thus
ordered to reinstate him to the Chelsea position and to make him
whole as to back pay and lost benefits.
Appellant's challenge to the district court's rulings
stems from its contention that the arbitrator exceeded his
authority under the Revere collective bargaining agreement by
ordering the employment of a member of that unit into the Chelsea
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unit. As a corollary to that issue, appellant claims that the
arbitrator lacked authority to interpret the Worker's
Compensation Act.
Labor arbitration is the product of the private will of
voluntarily consenting parties. Thus, the starting point, and in
a real sense the finishing one in this, as in most challenges to
arbitration awards, is the language of the collective bargaining
contract. Such language establishes the parameters of the
arbitrator's authority.
We commence our quest for the answers to the issues
raised by this appeal with a reading of Article XVIII of the
Revere Agreement entitled "Grievance Procedure," which provides
in Section 2, in effect, that in exchange for labor peace "during
the life of this Agreement[,] . . . any question of
interpretation, enforcement, adjustment or grievance . . .
between the employer and the Union and his employees which cannot
be adjusted[,] . . . shall be referred . . . to . . .
arbitration[,] . . . [which] . . . decision . . . shall be final
and binding upon both parties."
We next proceed to the specific provision upon which
the arbitrator relied for his ruling, Article XIV, Section 10(a)
of the Revere contract. It states that:
The Company shall either carry worker's
compensation or, in the event of an injury to an
employee, shall provide said employee with the
same benefits and payments and in the same manner
as provided by the provisions of the Worker's
Compensation Law (Massachusetts G.L., Chapter
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152) and Amendments thereto, up to and including
the date of the signing of this Agreement.
We thus come to Section 75A of the Massachusetts
Worker's Compensation statute, which the arbitrator found
applicable to the submitted grievance under the previously cited
contractual provision, and which he interpreted to require that
Abruzzese be reinstated to the Chelsea position notwithstanding
his previous employment outside that unit. Section 75A reads as
follows:
Any person who has lost a job as a result of an
injury compensable under this chapter shall be
given preference in hiring by the employer for
whom he worked at the time of compensable injury
over any persons not at the time of application
for re-employment employed by such employer;
provided, however, that a suitable job is
available. Actions may be filed under this
section with the superior court department of the
trial court for the county in which the alleged
violation occurred. An employer found to have
violated this section shall be exclusively liable
to pay to the employee lost wages, shall grant
the employee a suitable job, and shall reimburse
such reasonable attorney fees incurred in the
protection of rights granted by this section as
shall be determined by the court.
In the event that any right set forth in this
section is inconsistent with an applicable
collective bargaining agreement or chapter
thirty- one, the collective bargaining agreement
or said chapter thirty-one shall prevail.
Although we have often stated the following principle,
due to the number of groundless appeals that have come before us
challenging arbitration awards, it bears repeating that:
"[j]udicial review of an arbitration award is among the narrowest
known to the law." Maine Cent. R.R. Co. v. Brotherhood of
Maintenance of Way Employees, 873 F.2d 425, 428 (1st Cir. 1989).
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For courts "do not sit to hear claims of factual or legal error
by an arbitrator[,] as an appellate court does in reviewing
decisions of lower courts." United Paperworkers Int'l Union v.
Misco, 484 U.S. 29, 38 (1987). In fact, "[f]ederal court review
of arbitral decisions is extremely narrow and extraordinarily
deferential." Service Employees Int'l Union v. Local 1199, N.E.,
70 F.3d 647, 651 (1st Cir. 1995).
"[A] court should uphold an award that depends on the
arbitrator's interpretation of a collective bargaining agreement
if it can find, within the four corners of the agreement, any
plausible basis for that interpretation." El Dorado Technical
Servs., Inc. v. Uni n General de Trabajadores de Puerto Rico, 961
F.2d 317, 319 (1st Cir. 1992). That a court would have decided
an issue differently is not a basis for overruling an arbitrator
if the arbitrator "even arguably acted within the scope of his
authority." Misco, 484 U.S. at 38.
Absent a claim that the award is against an explicit,
well-defined, and dominant public policy, see Service Employees
Int'l Union, 70 F.3d at 652, the scope of review is limited to
claims that the arbitrator's decision is: "(1) unfounded in
reason and fact; (2) based on reasoning so palpably faulty that
no judge, or group of judges, ever could conceivably have made
such a ruling; or (3) mistakenly based on a crucial assumption
that is concededly a non-fact." Local 1445 United Food and
Commercial Workers Int'l Union v. Stop & Shop Cos., 776 F.2d 19,
21 (1st Cir. 1985). And, of course, "[a]n arbitrator's view of
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the scope of the issue . . . is entitled to the same . . .
deference . . . normally accorded to the arbitrator's
interpretation of the collective bargaining agreement itself."
Larocque v. R.W.F., Inc., 8 F.3d 95, 97 (1st Cir. 1993). Based
on these well-established principles, the outcome of this appeal
is preordained.
Although the scope of the reinstatement remedy provided
through an arbitral award is usually limited to the contractual
bargaining unit from which the grievance arises, a contrary
result is not unheard of where the parties have bargained to
grant the arbitrator such power. See supra. The parties to the
collective bargaining agreement, the same entities presently
before us, voluntarily contracted to submit to final and binding
arbitration any question of interpretation of that agreement, or
any grievance involving employees. It cannot be seriously
contended that the underlying controversy submitted to, and
litigated before, the arbitrator does not concern both the
interpretation of the collective bargaining agreement as well as
a grievance involving an employee. How can the arbitrator, in
determining whether appellant lived up to the contractual
obligations mandated by Section 10(a) of Article XIV of the
Revere Agreement, fail to address whether the provisions of the
Massachusetts Worker's Compensation Law, incorporated into that
agreement by Section 10(a), have been met?
The response to this question as well as to appellant's
challenge to the arbitrator's authority to interpret the
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aforementioned Massachusetts statute is self-evident. Obviously,
the arbitrator acted properly and within the scope of his
delegated authority. We can perceive of no valid reason why the
parties could not also agree to have statutory rights enforced
before an arbitral forum. See, e.g., Gilmer v.
Interstate/Johnson Lane Corp., 500 U.S. 20, 35 (1991) (holding
ADEA claims to be arbitrable); Bercovitch v. Baldwin Sch., Inc.,
1998 WL 5845, F.3d (1st Cir. 1998) (ADA claims subject to
arbitration); (Patterson v. Tenet Healthcare, Inc., 113 F.3d 832(8th Cir. 1997) (extending Gilmer to Title VII claims); Mago v.
Shearson Lehman Hutton, Inc., 956 F.2d 932, 935 (9th Cir. 1992)
(extending Gilmer to Title VII claims); Utley v. Goldman Sachs &
Co., 883 F.2d 184, 186 (1st Cir. 1989) (holding inter alia Title
VII claims to be arbitrable); cf. Shearson/American Express, Inc.
v. McMahon, 482 U.S. 220, 238 (1987) (holding Securities Exchange
Act and RICO claims to be arbitrable); Mitsubishi Motors Corp. v.
Soler Chrysler-Plymouth, Inc., 473 U.S. 614, 640 (1985) (holding
Sherman Act claims to be arbitrable).
A cursory reading of that statute leads to the
inevitable conclusion that the arbitrator's ruling in this case
was not only clearly within the powers granted to him in the
collective bargaining agreement, it is substantially the remedy
that the Massachusetts Superior Court would likely have felt
required to grant Joseph Abruzzese given that the appellant is a
single, unitary employer, for workman's compensation purpose. As
a result, its trinary profile, for labor relations purposes, is
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presently irrelevant. We note that our views as to the legal
soundness of the arbitrator's conclusions are largely gratuitous,
for as previously stated, even an erroneous interpretation of the
law by an arbitrator is not subject to judicial review if that
authority has been delegated to the arbitrator, as it was in this
case.
The decision of the district court is AFFIRMED. Costs
AFFIRMED
are granted to appellee.
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