By Chris Casillas and Jordan L. Jones
In Port of Bellingham, PERC Examiner Martin held that the employer did not commit a ULP by transferring daily inspection duties away from its maintenance employees without first providing an opportunity to bargain. Examiner Martin noted that the Port did not have an obligation to bargain in this case because (1) the work was so briefly assigned to the maintenance bargaining unit, (2) non-bargaining unit employees had also been performing the work, and (3) by the time the work was transferred to other port employees it was fundamentally different from the maintenance bargaining unit’s regular work.
In this case, the Port installed a new baggage conveyor belt system to handle an increase in passenger activity at its airport. As part of this new conveyor belt system, the maintenance union performed all preventative duties such as cleaning, adjusting, and making small repairs to the equipment which included first conducting a “hands off” approach of running the system to detect problems. Typical daily inspections would occur around 7 a.m. when maintenance employees’ shifts began.
After the Port received advice from the conveyor belt system’s manufacturer that inspections should occur much earlier than 7 a.m. (i.e., before customers began arriving), the employer allowed airport ops to perform the daily minimal hands off inspections since they were at the airport 24/7. If the airport ops detected any problems with the conveyor belt system, the maintenance employees would be called in to perform the substantive fixes. The maintenance union subsequently filed a ULP alleging that the Port had a duty to bargain before skimming their bargaining unit work away.
Examiner Martin noted that while the hands off inspections were part of the bargaining unit work “historically” performed by the maintenance union, that history was brief since the system had recently been installed, and the detriment to the bargaining unit was small given that the employer only transferred the daily inspections and not all of the preventative maintenance duties. Examiner Martin also stated that when the inspections were transferred to the airport ops, no layoffs occurred and the maintenance employees did not have their schedules reduced nor lose overtime opportunities. In fact, before airport ops were assigned daily inspections, the conveyor belt’s manufacturer had representatives on the ground assisting inspections. Examiner Martin also found that “[o]nce the employer determined it no longer wanted to conduct daily preventive maintenance and replaced it with quicker, daily ‘hands off’ inspections, the work became fundamentally different from the maintenance bargaining unit’s typical work.”
The ULP was dismissed by PERC after Examiner Martin held that the factors in this case support a finding that the Port did not have an obligation to bargain regarding the transfer of daily inspections.
This case serves as a reminder that even when bargaining unit work is technically transferred it does not always invoke a duty to bargain on the part of the employer. In skimming cases, PERC employs a multi-step analysis that first assesses whether the work is even bargaining unit work to begin with, but then analyzes any bargaining obligation the employer may have based on factors such as whether the transfer imposed a significant detriment to the bargaining unit and what the employer’s motivation was in making the transfer. In some cases, such as this one, while there was a technical transfer, the Examiner determined it did not invoke a subsequent duty to bargain because these other factors in PERC’s skimming analysis were not satisfied.
