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August 02, 2001
Anti-Union Campaign Brings $10M Ruling
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A massive, six-year anti-union campaign has earned a Louisiana shipyard an order to not only reinstate 22 workers, but also to pay $10 million in legal fees, back pay, and benefits.
It must also publish the order, issued by a National Labor Relations Board judge, in the New Orleans Times-Picayune newspaper once a week for a month.
In a 275-page opinion, National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) Judge Philip McLeod found 141 labor violations by New Orleans-based Avondale Industries, according to the National Law Journal.
Most of the executives responsible left when the firm was purchased by Litton Corp. in 1999. Litton, in turn, has since been acquired by Northrop Grumman Corp.
McLeod listed interrogations, warnings, layoffs and firings by Avondale managers that began when its 4,100 employees voted in 1993 to have the New Orleans Metal Trades Council bargain for them, the Journal reports.
"The respondent waged an aggressive counter-campaign that was broad in scope, reckless in implementation and that is likely to have a continuing coercive effect on the free exercise of employee rights," he wrote.
The National Law Journal quotes an unnamed Northrop Grumman lawyer as saying that of the 102 employees who alleged wrongful terminations in three separate NLRB actions against Avondale, "we won 51 and the government won 51."
In addition to ordering the reinstatement of employees who were fired for union activity, the judge told the shipyard to pay legal fees incurred by the union and the NLRB; to reimburse 25 disciplined employees for lost wages, benefits and seniority; and to erase personnel file references to union activity.
McLeod also ordered the shipyard to repay $5.4 million that it had billed the U.S. Navy for fees associated with the litigation. When the Clinton Administration discovered the payments in 1999, it issued a military procurement rule barring such payments to any company. Congress repealed the rule this year.
A spokesman for Northrop Grumman said the company "strongly disagrees" with the order. Grumman has until Sept. 17 to appeal the decision to the full NLRB.
Garry G. Mathiason, a labor law expert at San Francisco's Littler Mendelson, called the penalties unusual. "We've always understood that those are potential remedies, but they're uncommon except in the contempt area," he told the Journal.
The case, New Orleans Metal Trades Council v. Avondale Industries Inc., is one of three labor actions brought against the shipyard since 1993. The vast number of witnesses and exhibits, the litigation contesting the 1993 union election and a Northrop Grumman Freedom of Information Act request, says one defense lawyer, were responsible for the dispute's length.
In a 1998 ruling in the first Avondale case, Administrative Law Judge Donald Evans found numerous labor violations by the shipyard. Evans held that 28 employees had been fired for union activity, and he ordered them reinstated with back pay. He also issued a broad cease-and-desist order against Avondale due to its "general disregard for the employees' fundamental rights." That case is before the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
Read the National Law Journal story at Law.com.