National Labor Relations Board v. Holmes Tuttle Broadway Ford, Inc.

The National Labor Relations Board seeks enforcement of its order requiring respondent employer to bargain in good faith with Local 310 of the Teamsters’ Union. . The order is predicated upon careful and detailed findings of the trial examiner, who concluded that the employer had refused to bargain in good faith in violation of Section 8(a) (5) and (1) of the National Labor Relations Act, as amended, 29 U.S.C. § 158 (a) (5) and (1). The trial examiner’s decision and the board’s decision and order appear at 186 NLRB No. 14 , and this opinion assumes familiarity with them.

In essence, the employer argues that the trial examiner’s findings, adopted by the board, are not “supported by substantial evidence on the record considered as a whole” (§ 10(e) of the Act, 29 U.S.C. § 160 (e)), in two major respects. It argues, first, that, at most, the record shows permissible hard bargaining, in good faith, not a refusal to bargain, and second, that its insistence on a termination date for the proposed contract that was only seven weeks away was based on a good faith doubt as to whether the union still represented a majority of the employees in the unit, and that it therefore selected the end…