Massachusetts Nurses Ass'n v. North Adams Regional Hospital , 467 F.3d 27 ( 2006 )

United States Court of Appeals
For the First Circuit
No. 05-2799
MASSACHUSETTS NURSES ASSOCIATION,
Plaintiff, Appellant,
v.
NORTH ADAMS REGIONAL HOSPITAL,
Defendant, Appellee.
APPEAL FROM THE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT
FOR THE DISTRICT OF MASSACHUSETTS
[Hon. Kenneth P. Neiman, U.S. Magistrate Judge]
Before
Boudin, Chief Judge,
Selya, Circuit Judge, and
Schwarzer,* Senior District Judge.
Mark A. Hickernell, with whom Alan J. McDonald and McDonald,
Lamond & Canzoneri were on brief, for appellant.
Robert B. Gordon, with whom David C. Potter and Ropes & Gray
LLP were on brief, for appellee.
October 26, 2006
__________
*Of the Northern District of California, sitting by designation.
SELYA, Circuit Judge. This appeal requires us to mull
the circumstances in which a union, having successfully arbitrated
a grievance, may leverage the award to bypass procedures prescribed
by a collective bargaining agreement and obtain direct federal
court relief for subsequent episodes of alleged employer
misconduct. In the case at hand, the district court thwarted the
union's attempt to short-circuit the grievance process, finding too
great a disparity between the facts underlying the initial
complaints and those giving rise to the subsequent complaints.
After careful consideration, we affirm.
I.
Background
North Adams Regional Hospital (the Hospital) employs
nurses represented by the Massachusetts Nurses Association (MNA).
This dispute arises out of a collective bargaining agreement (CBA)
between the two organizations. Article 18.07 of the CBA contains
a provision entitled "Standards of Nursing Practice," which
requires the Hospital to "only keep and admit the number of
patients that registered nurses can safely care for" and to "take
measures such as adding nurses [and] stopping admissions . . . to
ensure that this occurs." The CBA further provides a stereotypical
grievance procedure, culminating in binding arbitration, to resolve
covered disputes.
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In 2002, nurses employed by the Hospital filed
approximately nine reports alleging inadequate staffing on a
particular floor (Three North) in violation of Article 18.07. The
MNA converted these complaints into formal grievances. Arbitration
hearings took place in 2003 and 2004. On February 21, 2005, the
arbitrator, Michael Stutz, found that the Hospital had transgressed
the CBA and issued a remedial order. We need not recount all the
particulars of the arbitrator's entire decision and order
(collectively, the Stutz Award); for now, it suffices to repeat the
order alone:
a) The Hospital shall cease and desist
violating Article 18.07 of the Agreement;
b) The Hospital shall pay the MNA an amount of
money equal to the pay of one RN for each of
the nine shifts grieved; and
c) The Hospital shall pay the RN's working the
nine shifts time and one half for those nine
shifts, i.e. the difference between time and
one half pay and what they actually were paid.
In the spring of 2005 — some three years after the events
that gave rise to the initial grievances — nurses at the Hospital
reported what they believed to be additional violations of Article
18.07. While at least one of these reports dealt with an event on
Three North, the vast majority of them involved events occurring in
other areas of the Hospital. Rather than converting these
complaints into one or more formal grievances, the MNA attempted a
short-cut; it filed a direct action in the federal district court,
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seeking enforcement of the cease-and-desist portion of the Stutz
Award.1 That action rested on section 301 of the Labor-Management
Relations Act, 29 U.S.C. § 185, which authorizes federal district
courts to enforce collective bargaining pacts and, thus, to enforce
labor arbitration awards issued pursuant to such pacts.2 See
Textile Workers v. Lincoln Mills, 353 U.S. 448, 451 (1957). This
means that where, as here, a collective bargaining agreement
contains an arbitration clause, an arbitral award is akin to a
contractual obligation that can be enforced through a civil action
under section 301. See Local 2322, Int'l Bhd. of Elec. Workers v.
Verizon New Engl., Inc., ___F.3d ___, ___ (1st Cir. 2006) [No. 06-
1169, slip op. at 5].
The Hospital answered the complaint. It then moved for
judgment on the pleadings, see Fed. R. Civ. P. 12(c), arguing that
the 2005 reports arose out of a variegated set of factual
predicates materially different from the factual predicate on which
the earlier grievances reposed and that, therefore, enforcement
constituted an inappropriate avenue for relief. The MNA opposed
the motion. By consent of the parties, the matter was entrusted to
a magistrate judge for decision. See 28 U.S.C. § 636(c); Fed. R.
1
The MNA also sought to adjudge the Hospital in violation of
another portion of the Stutz Award. That dispute has been
resolved.
2
The parties speak, interchangeably, of both "confirming" and
"enforcing" the Stutz Award. Because enforcement seems more apt in
the context of this case, we use that terminology.
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Civ. P. 73. After a comprehensive analysis of the Stutz Award and
the applicable law, the judge agreed with the Hospital's
characterization and allowed the motion. This timely appeal
followed.
II.
Analysis
Both parties rely heavily on our prior pronouncements
regarding the enforcement of arbitral awards. Consequently, we
start there.
In previous cases, we have recognized that, at least
since the Supreme Court decided the so-called Steelworkers trilogy,
see United Steelworkers v. Am. Mfg. Co., 363 U.S. 564 (1960);
United Steelworkers v. Warrior & Gulf Navig. Co., 363 U.S. 574(1960); United Steelworkers v. Enter. Wheel & Car Corp., 363 U.S.
593 (1960), the federal courts are to play a narrowly circumscribed
role in the administration of labor arbitration. See, e.g., Boston
Shipping Ass'n, Inc. v. Int'l Longshoremen's Ass'n, 659 F.2d 1, 3
(1st Cir. 1981). We have been particularly loath to take too
expansive a view of the precedential effect of arbitration awards,
emphasizing that this phenomenon is primarily a matter for the
arbitrator, not for a court. See Courier-Citizen Co. v. Boston
Electrotypers Union No. 11, 702 F.2d 273, 280 (1st Cir. 1983).
This does not denote, however, that unions invariably must be
consigned to Sisyphean labors, forced to arbitrate the same
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grievance again and again. See Locals 2222, 2320-2327, Int'l Bhd.
of Elec. Workers v. New Engl. Tel. & Tel. Co., 628 F.2d 644, 649
(1st Cir. 1980). In appropriate circumstances, a court may order
the enforcement of a prior arbitration award as a means of
resolving a subsequent labor dispute. See, e.g., Boston Shipping,
659 F.2d at 4.
The trick, of course, is discerning what circumstances
are sufficient to warrant bypassing the normal grievance
procedures. Even though we enforced the original arbitral award in
Boston Shipping, we made clear that this result was the exception
rather than the rule; such an anodyne is available only if "it is
beyond argument that there is no material factual difference
between the new dispute and the one decided in the prior
arbitration." Id. We fleshed out that commentary two years later,
stating that:
Only where an arbitral award is both clearly
intended to have a prospective effect and
there is no colorable basis for denying the
applicability of the existing award to a
dispute at hand, will a court order compliance
with the award rather than require the parties
to proceed anew through the contract grievance
procedure.
Derwin v. Gen. Dynamics Corp., 719 F.2d 484, 491 (1st Cir. 1983).
Read carefully, these two decisions illustrate the proper
application of the standard. In the former case, the new dispute
was identical to the original dispute except for the intervening
renewal of the collective bargaining agreement; accordingly,
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enforcement was an available remedy. Boston Shipping, 659 F.2d at
4. In the latter case, we refused to follow that course because
the union had failed to show a new and identical dispute. See
Derwin, 719 F.2d at 491 (warning that this court would not "put its
imprimatur upon an arbitral award in a vacuum"). This cautious
approach toward the hopscotch enforcement of arbitration awards
vis-á-vis new grievances is solidly within the mainstream of labor
law as elucidated by other courts of appeals. See, e.g., Local
1545, United Mine Workers v. Inland Steel Coal Co., 876 F.2d 1288,
1295-97 (7th Cir. 1989) (requiring that facts underlying prior
award and those underlying subsequent violation be "substantially
identical" in order to warrant enforcement); United Mine Workers,
Dist. 5 v. Consol. Coal Co., 666 F.2d 806, 811 (3d Cir. 1981)
(explaining that enforcement of a prior award requires a court to
say with "positive assurance" that the award was intended to cover
the new dispute); Oil, Chem. & Atomic Workers Int'l Union v. Ethyl
Corp., 644 F.2d 1044, 1050 (5th Cir. 1981) (delineating a
substantial similarity standard).
Mindful of this well-manicured legal landscape, our
primary task here is to determine whether the Stutz Award was
intended to have a prospective effect, and if so, whether there is
any colorable basis for denying its applicability to the new
incidents. We turn now to that task.
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To its credit, the MNA attempts to meet the Hospital's
challenge head-on. It does not question the applicability of
Derwin and Boston Shipping but, rather, contends that the current
dispute qualifies for enforcement under our historic standard. Its
thesis is that because the prior and current disputes share a
common factual nucleus — all of them involve alleged violations of
Article 18.07 — there is no material factual difference and,
therefore, enforcement is appropriate. To justify this result, the
MNA notes that the first page of the Stutz Award — the three-
paragraph remedial order quoted above — contains no specific
reference to Three North. Building on that foundation, it argues
that the Stutz Award applies hospital-wide. Its fallback position
is that it should at least have been allowed to proceed in the
district court with the alleged violations that occurred on Three
North.
The Hospital counters that context is crucial and that,
taking context into account, there is at least an arguable basis
for rejecting the claim that the new dispute is materially
indistinguishable from the old dispute (and, thus, for rejecting
the applicability of the Stutz Award). In mounting this counter-
argument, the Hospital goes beyond the remedial order and points to
the arbitrator's statement, in the body of the decision, that "the
most important goal of remedy in this case is [to] assure that
there is no repetition of the circumstances that prevailed on at
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least nine occasions in May and June 2002 on Three North"
(emphasis supplied). It also adverts to the arbitrator's singular
focus on Three North in his descriptions of staffing violations.
Finally, it directs our attention to facts properly before us
evidencing that it has made significant staffing changes, on Three
North and elsewhere throughout the institution, since the emergence
of the grievances that spawned the original arbitration. In
conclusion, the Hospital posits that, given these changed
circumstances, the new complaints cannot conceivably be thought to
mimic the grievances that formed the basis for the Stutz Award.
The district court resolved the MNA's enforcement action
on a Rule 12(c) motion. The guidelines applicable to judgment on
the pleadings require the court to accept all the well-pleaded
facts as true, draw all reasonable inferences in favor of the
nonmovant (here, the MNA), and grant the motion only if it appears
that the nonmovant could prove no set of facts that would entitle
it to relief. See Rivera-Gomez v. de Castro, 843 F.2d 631, 635
(1st Cir. 1988). As the CBA, the Stutz Award, and four of the new
incident reports were annexed to the pleadings,3 so the court could
consider them in conducting its tamisage. See Centro Medico del
Turabo, Inc., v. Feliciano de Melecio, 406 F.3d 1, 5 (1st Cir.
3
While the remaining reports were not so annexed, the parties
have made persistent references to them during the course of this
appeal.
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2005); In re Colonial Mortg. Bankers Corp., 324 F.3d 12, 15 (1st
Cir. 2003).
In hewing to this protocol, the district court chose to
look beyond the isthmian confines of the remedial order to the body
of the arbitrator's decision and the facts contained therein. In
the end, it concluded that material factual differences marked the
two disputes. Accordingly, it granted the Hospital's motion for
judgment on the pleadings.
We review the district court's entry of judgment on the
pleadings de novo, subject to the same ground rules that were
applicable in the lower court. See Gulf Coast Bank & Trust Co. v.
Reder, 355 F.3d 35, 37 (1st Cir. 2004); Feliciano v. Rhode Island,
160 F.3d 780, 788 (1st Cir. 1998). Even when scrutinized through
the prism of this plaintiff-friendly standard of review, the MNA's
argument falters.
To be sure, the MNA fulfills the first prong of the
Derwin test: the Stutz Award plainly satisfies Derwin's requirement
that the original award be prospective. Indeed, the very nature of
cease-and-desist orders is to provide prospective relief. See P.R.
Mar. Shipping Auth. v. Fed. Mar. Comm'n, 75 F.3d 63, 65 (1st Cir.
1996).
The MNA does less well with Derwin's second prong. On
its side of the decisional scales is the fact that here, unlike in
Derwin, the complaint alleges specific new violations and does not
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ask us to place our imprimatur upon the earlier arbitral award in
a vacuum. Yet the allegations of the complaint do not show, as
Derwin demands, that it is "beyond argument that there is no
material factual difference between the new dispute and the one
decided in the prior arbitration." Derwin, 719 F.2d at 491 (citing
Boston Shipping, 659 F.2d at 4).
The Stutz Award is annexed to and therefore incorporated
by reference in the complaint. Accordingly, the district court had
the obligation to go behind the bare bones of the remedial order
and look at the whole of the Stutz Award. See Boston Shipping, 659
F.2d at 4 (relying upon supporting rationale of arbitrator in
affirming enforcement of award). Taking into account the tenor of
the arbitrator's decision and the available descriptions of the
various incidents (new and old), it is perfectly plain that, even
if all of the new disputes had taken place on Three North — and the
bulk of them did not — that spatial coincidence, standing alone,
would be insufficient to show the requisite similitude. The
additional fact that all the complaints invoked Article 18.07 of
the CBA does not suffice to remedy this shortcoming.4 On these
facts, the intervening passage of time and the changed nature of
hospital staffing patterns and practices combine to form an
4
It appears that at least one of the new complaints may not
implicate Article 18.07 at all. For our purposes, nothing turns on
this fact; accordingly we assume, favorably to the MNA, that all
the new complaints implicate Article 18.07.
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insurmountable barrier to the applicability of the earlier award.
We explain briefly.
The MNA's complaint makes no meaningful effort to show
the requisite similitude beyond the fact that several of the
incidents transpired on Three North and came under the aegis of
Article 18.07. Its argument does not fairly suggest identicality:
as the Stutz Award and the incident reports reflect, staffing at
the Hospital — like hospital staffing generally — is not a matter
of simple arithmetic. To the contrary, it requires a sophisticated
algorithm with many variables.
The nature of this complex endeavor is such that
reasonable minds may differ as to the most salutary ratios in
particular circumstances. See generally Julie Marie Bessette, An
Analysis in Support of Minimum Nurse-to-Patient Ratios in
Massachusetts, 9 Quinnipiac Health L.J. 173, 207 (2006) (noting the
view that staffing involves "much more than arbitrary numbers,
including judgment and critical thinking by nurse administrators
and consideration of the patient's needs"). As documented in the
Stutz Award, staffing at the Hospital involves variables such as
patient acuity and nurses' skill sets. Common sense suggests that
a host of other variables (say, case mix, volume, availability of
para-professional aides, overtime policies) will influence nurse-
staffing needs. See generally Kyndaron Reinier et al., Measuring
the Nursing Workforce, 62 Med. Care Res. & Rev. 741, 743 (2005)
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(listing numerous "hospital-level factors" that affect the need for
nurses). In such a dynamic environment, it is surpassingly
difficult to imagine a situation in which no material factual
differences would exist between staffing inadequacies arising in
2002 and kindred incidents occurring nearly three years later.
The proof of the pudding can be found in the text of the
Stutz Award. There, the arbitrator — conscious of the time lag
between the occurrence of the underlying incidents and the date of
decision — acknowledged that the violations he had found might not
be ongoing. He noted that, even then, the Hospital had begun
addressing staffing concerns by raising patient care hours, adding
nursing hours on Three North, and instituting a formal system for
assessing patient acuity. These particular systemic changes, along
with the ordinary changes in personnel and patient mix that
inevitably occur over time in any acute-care hospital, present a
more than colorable basis for concluding that the original award,
issued to remedy conditions existing in a particular area of the
Hospital three years earlier, rested on a factual predicate that is
(or, at least, may be) materially different from the factual
predicate underlying the MNA's latest litany of complaints.
III.
Conclusion
We need go no further. The upshot is that the district
court did not err in refusing woodenly to apply and enforce the
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prior arbitral award to the MNA's subsequent misgivings with the
Hospital.
Affirmed.
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