General Electric Co.

National Labor Relations Board - Board Decisions

Oct 28, 1968

173 N.L.R.B. 399 (N.L.R.B. 1968)

GENERAL ELECTRIC CO
General Electric Company and American Federation
of Technical Engineers , AFL-CIO, Petitioner.
Case 1-RC-9664
October 28, 1968
DECISION AND ORDER
BY MEMBERS BROWN , JENKINS, AND ZAGORIA
Upon a petition duly filed under Section 9(c) of
the National Labor Relations Act, as amended, a
hearing was held before Arnold M Marrow, Hearing
Officer. Thereafter, pursuant to Section 102 67 of the
National Labor Relations Board Rules and Regula-
tions and Statements of Procedure, Series 8, as
amended, and by direction of the Regional Director
for Region 1, this case was transferred to the National
Labor Relations Board for decision. Briefs have been
timely filed by the Employer, Petitioner, and Inter-
venor.
Pursuant to the provisions of Section 3(b) of the
National Labor Relations Act, as amended, the
National Labor Relations Board has delegated its
powers in connection with this case to a three-mem-
ber panel.
The Board has reviewed the Hearing Officer's
rulings made at the hearing and finds that they are
free from prejudicial error. They are hereby affirmed.
Upon the entire record in this case, the Board
finds
1. The Employer is engaged in commerce within
the meaning of the Act and it will effectuate the
policies of the Act to assert jurisdiction herein.
2. The labor organizations' involved claim to
represent certain employees of the Employer.
3. No question affecting commerce exists con-
cerning the representation of certain employees of the
Employer within the meaning of Section 9(c)(1) and
Section 2(6) and (7) of the Act, for the following
reasons*
The Employer maintains an Instrument Depart-
ment at West Lynn, Massachusetts,' where it is
engaged in the production of precision instruments.
The Intervenor, following a Board election, was
certified in 1950 as the bargaining representative of
the production and maintenance employees. En-
gineering assistants were excluded from the list of
those eligible to vote in that election. In 1957, the
title of engineering assistant was changed to
I Local 201, International Union of Electrical , Radio and Machine
Workers AFL-CIO, was permitted to intervene on the basis of its
contractual interest
2 The Instrument Department is organized into six functional
sections , namely , Finance, Marketing , Engineering , Advance Develop-
ment , Manufacturing , and Employee Relations.
399
engineering technician. Since 1950, neither the en-
gineering assistants nor the retitled engineering tech-
nicians have been represented by the Intervenor. In
fact, when an employee is promoted to the position
of engineering technician it has been the Employer's
policy to condition such promotion on the em-
ployee's resigning from the Intervenor. As in the case
of the retitling of engineering assistants to engineering
technicians in 1957, laboratory assistants were re-
titled laboratory technicians The latter classification
of employees has been in the production and main-
tenance bargaining unit since its inception in 1950.
The Petitioner initially sought to represent a unit
of all engineering technicians and laboratory tech-
nicians at the exempt salary level of the Employer's
Instrument Department. At the outset of the hearing
herein the Petitioner amended its petition to define
the unit as all engineering technicians and laboratory
technicians of the Employer's Instrument Depart-
ment, excluding laboratory technicians represented
by the Intervenor. The Petitioner again amended its
petition to define the unit as all engineering tech-
nicians of the Employer's Instrument Department. At
the close of the hearing, the Petitioner stated on the
record that "the unit we seek to represent would
include the employees described in a broad category
of Engineering Technicians, and the majority of these
employees are in Intervenor's Exhibit 1, which was a
list submitted to the company of 51 names of
Engineering Technicians." The Petitioner then added
the following- "Our definition of the statement that
we made in the broad category of Engineering
Technicians would include any people who had been
identified by the Company as Engineering Tech-
nicians, `Specialists' "3
The Employer and the Intervenor contend that the
unit is too narrow in scope and fails to include
engineering specialists who perform similar or related
duties within the engineering sections as presently
structured. The Intervenor further contends, and the
Employer contends to the contrary, that there is a
contract bar.
We find it unnecessary to decide herein as to
whether there is a contract bar. We believe the
petition must be dismissed on the grounds that the
unit requested is not justified on any of the bases
which the Board usually relies on in determining
appropriateness of a unit.
The Petitioner has included in its unit request
all engineering technicians and specialists employed
at the Instrument Department, amounting to
3 The Employer contends that "specialist " is not a classification, but
rather, that it is a catch-all term used to describe any individual
contributor for whom there is no other obvious designation . Record
testimony describes a specialist as an engineering technician who has
become proficient in his particular phase of work , and who is called a
specialist so as to justify a higher salary than could be paid him as an
engineering technician.
173 NLRB No. 64
400 DECISIONS OF NATIONAL LABOR RELATIONS BOARD
approximately 62 in number. They are assigned as
follows: 40 engineering technicians and 15 specialists
to the Engineering Section; and 3 engineering tech-
nicians and 4 specialists to the Advanced Develop-
ment Section. But it is not enough for the Petitioner
to show that it is willing to represent all of the
engineering technicians and the specialists at the
Instrument Department; it must also establish why
they should be represented separately.
On the basis of the record, it does not appear that
the employees sought are craftsmen4 or that they
constitute a single departmental group entitled to
separate representation. Furthermore, the record
shows that the engineering technicians and the spe-
cialists are a segment of all the technical employees at
the Instrument Department The thrust of the evi-
dence Petitioner presented and the argument in its
brief is that engineering technicians and specialists
have greater responsibilities and more complex duties
than the laboratory technicians, which classification is
in the bargaining unit represented by the Intervenor.
The same consideration is equally applicable, how-
ever, to an undetermined number of employees at the
Instrument Department, including technicals, who are
classified as specialists5 and who are unrepresented.
Although the Petitioner's unit request includes all
specialists at the Instrument Department, it appears
that such request is limited to the aforementioned
specialists employed in the Engineering Section and
the Advanced Development Section. The Board has
held that a unit of technical employees is inap-
propriate where it does not include all in that
category.' Accordingly, as the employees sought do
not qualify for separate representation on a craft,
departmental, or residual basis, we find that the unit
petitioned for is inappropriate, and we shall dismiss
the petition.
ORDER
It is hereby ordered that the petition herein be, and
the same hereby is, dismissed.
4 The Boeing Company , 144 NLRB 1110 6 The Bendix Corporation , Kansas City Division , 150 NLRB 718,
5 There are specialists in the manufacturing section who work in 720,721
constant contact with engineering technicians.