Court Blocks Department Of Labor From Invalidating Election

In the recently decided case of Solis v. Amalgamated Transit Union, Local 1005, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit upheld the fairness of an election in which the union did not explicitly notify members of a change in the eligibility requirement for election to union office. This change consisted of the dropping of a previously held meeting attendance requirement.

 

Prior to October of 2007, the union had only represented state and municipal workers. It was therefore excluded from the scope of the Labor-Management Reporting and Disclosure Act of 1959. Had the union been subject to LMRDA, the Act would have barred the attendance requirement. Subsequently however, the union became the bargaining representative for workers at a private bus line. Now that it was a "mixed" union, Local 1005 came under the jurisdiction of the LMRDA.

 

The union's longstanding meeting attendance requirement had required that any member seeking to run for elected office had to have attended at least six regular meetings each year during the 24 months prior to and including nomination meetings. Up until October of 2007, the union strictly enforced this provision of its by-laws, as was well known among its members.  The union constitution, however, clearly stated that once its elections were subject to the LMRDA, the meeting attendance requirement could no longer be enforced.

 

The union scheduled two nominating meetings for September 23, 2008. Twenty-nine days before these meetings, the union posted written notices on every workplace bulletin board that under its by-laws the only requirement for eligibility was membership in the union for at least two years. Some members were confused and thought that the meeting attendance requirement was still in effect and had inadvertently been omitted from the posting. All members who made inquiries on the matter were correctly informed by the union that the meeting attendance requirement was no longer applicable.
 

The Secretary of Labor argued that the union had not done all it could have done prior to the nomination meetings to clear-up any potential confusion about the eligibility requirement pursuant to the adequate safeguards provision of the LMRDA. Here, the Secretary had the burden of establishing, by a preponderance of the evidence, that the adequate safeguards provision was violated. If such a violation could be shown, the presumption would be that the violation materially affected the outcome of the elections in question. The burden would then shift to the union to establish, by the same measure, that even assuming that there was a violation, the outcome of the election was not affected by it.

 

The Court of Appeals upheld on the facts the District Court's ruling that the Secretary did not meet the threshold burden of establishing a violation of the adequate safeguards provision. In its ruling the Court relied heavily on a Ninth Circuit ruling in Provision House, 623 F.2nd at 1323, in which a local union established new election requirements without prior notice at a noisy meeting where it was difficult to hear the recording secretary and several members who spoke Spanish could not understand the English reading of the new rules.  The Ninth Circuit found that, while the members did not have perfect notice of the new rules, the members' confusion could be attributed to their lack of attention at the meeting rather than to any failure of the union to adequately communicate the new requirements.

 

While the Eighth Circuit ruling could be viewed as reasonable given the facts in the Amalgamated Transit Union case, it is unfortunate that it relied on and reaffirmed the absurd Ninth Circuit finding in Provision House.