American Postal v. U.S. Postal Service

March 19, 1996 [NOT FOR PUBLICATION]
[NOT FOR PUBLICATION]

UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS
FOR THE FIRST CIRCUIT

No. 95-1865

AMERICAN POSTAL WORKERS UNION, ETC., ET AL.,

Plaintiffs, Appellants,

v.

UNITED STATES POSTAL SERVICE, ET AL.,

Defendants, Appellees.

APPEAL FROM THE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT

FOR THE DISTRICT OF MASSACHUSETTS

[Hon. Nancy Gertner, U.S. District Judge]

Before

Selya, Circuit Judge,

Campbell, Senior Circuit Judge,

and Stahl, Circuit Judge.

Cornelius J. P. Sullivan, with whom Brenda E. W. Sullivan

and Sullivan & Walsh were on brief, for appellants.

Susan M. Poswistilo, Assistant United States Attorney, with

whom Donald K. Stern, United States Attorney, R. Andrew German,

Chief Appellate Counsel, United States Postal Service, and Brian

M. Reimer, Attorney, United States Postal Service, were on brief,

for appellees.

Per Curiam. When Congress established the Postal
Per Curiam

Service (the Service) in 1970, it set in place a labor relations

format patterned after the private sector. See 39 U.S.C.

1201-1209 (1994). Under that framework, appellant American

Postal Workers Union, AFL-CIO (the Union) entered into a series

of collective bargaining agreements with the Service. During the

currency of one such agreement, the Service discharged a trio of

postal workers (Dennis Daniels, Jonathan Davis, and Karen

Johnson) for cause.

The three all of whom worked at the Sudbury,

Massachusetts post office were members of a bargaining unit

represented by the Union. The Union prosecuted grievances on

their behalf. Following a five-day evidentiary hearing, the

arbitrator found that the grievants committed the acts with which

they had been charged, and that the Service had just cause for

the disciplinary actions which it took in first suspending, and

later ousting, the grievants.

The Union filed an action in the federal district court

with a view toward vacating the arbitral award.1 Its complaint

claimed that the award "did not draw its essence from the

collective bargaining agreement" because it was "not based on

sufficient evidence to sustain a finding of just cause." In a

well-reasoned opinion, the district court granted the Service's

1For ease in reference, we treat the case if the Union and
the Service were the sole protagonists. In the circumstances at
hand, the presence of other parties adds nothing of any
consequence.

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motion for summary judgment. See American Postal Workers Union

v. United States Postal Serv., No. 92-10364-NG, slip op. (D.

Mass. June 28, 1995). The Union appeals. We summarily affirm.

There is no need to tarry. Having read the voluminous

record, considered the parties' briefs, and entertained oral

argument, we find no basis to disturb either the arbitral award

or the district court's decision. To the precise contrary, we

regard this as a paradigmatic case in which to put into practice

our oft-stated belief that, when lower courts have done first-

rate work, an appellate tribunal should not wax longiloquent

simply to hear its own words resonate. See In re San Juan Dupont

Plaza Hotel Fire Litig., 989 F.2d 36, 38 (1st Cir. 1993).

Consequently, we affirm the judgment for substantially the

reasons elucidated in the opinion below. We add only a few brief

comments.

The statute that confers a right to challenge an

arbitral award in a postal employment case, 39 U.S.C. 1208(b),

is an analog to section 301 of the Labor Management Relations

Act, 29 U.S.C. 185(a), and therefore, the case law under the

two statutes is generally interchangeable. See Miller v. United

States Postal Serv., 985 F.2d 9, 10 n.1 (1st Cir. 1993). Under

either scheme, "courts are not authorized to reconsider the

merits of arbitration awards." S. D. Warren Co. v. United

Paperworkers' Int'l Union, Local 1069, 845 F.2d 3, 7 (1st Cir.),

cert. denied, 488 U.S. 992 (1988). The exceptions to this rule

are few and far between. See Advest, Inc. v. McCarthy, 914 F.2d

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6, 8 (1st Cir. 1990) (limning exceptions); Bettencourt v. Boston

Edison Co., 560 F.2d 1045, 1049 (1st Cir. 1977) (similar). To

make a long story short, a challenger must show that the award is

"(1) unfounded in reason and fact; (2) based on reasoning so

palpably faulty that no judge, or group of judges, ever could

conceivably have made such a ruling; or (3) mistakenly based on a

crucial assumption that is concededly a non-fact." Local 1445,

United Food & Commercial Workers v. Stop & Shop Cos., 776 F.2d

19, 21 (1st Cir. 1985). These exceptions are narrowly construed

and, unless one of them applies, even "a court's conviction that

the arbitrator made a serious mistake or committed grievous error

will not furnish a satisfactory basis for undoing the decision."

Advest, Inc., 914 F.2d at 9; accord Georgia-Pacific Corp. v.

Local 27, United Paperworkers Int'l Union, 864 F.2d 940, 944 (1st

Cir. 1988).

As the district court recognized, the instant case does

not fit within the confines of any of the three long-odds

exceptions. The linchpin of the Union's position, as counsel

made clear at oral argument, is that the arbitral award is

irrational because the three grievants were all audited on the

same day and only minor discrepancies were found in their stamp

stock. Therefore, the Union's thesis runs, it is impossible that

any of the trio could have stolen stamp stock (from which it

follows that the arbitrator based his decision on facts that

could not have been true).

To be sure, this is one possible interpretation of

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selected items of evidence. But the arbitrator faced a golconda

of conflicting testimony regarding specific dates, and the Union

has simply woven together the timeline most beneficial to its

view of the universe. The arbitrator apparently chose a

different timeline after hearing the witnesses and carefully

considering the surrounding circumstances. The record supports a

finding that Daniels was audited for the second time on Monday,

April 16, 1990, when Davis was absent from work, and not on

Tuesday, April 17; that Davis and Johnson were then audited the

next day (April 17); and that, although no substantial amounts of

stamp stock were found to be missing, some form of deception or

sleight of hand was being practiced by the three clerks to hide

the fact incontrovertibly proven that Davis had stolen as

much as $6,000 by unauthorized withdrawals from his stock.

We add two further observations. First, even if the

three grievants all had been audited on the same day as the Union

contends, the arbitrator's conclusion of just cause for discharge

would remain soundly based.2 Second, while the exceptions we

2The postmaster (Packard) sealed the safe containing the
clerks' cash drawers on Saturday evening, April 14, and upon
returning to work on Monday morning noticed signs of a break-in.
When audits were conducted on Monday and Tuesday, Daniels and
Johnson showed an unusual loss of large denomination stamps,
while Davis had an inexplicable surplus of $2 stamps. Moreover,
Johnson's fingerprints were found on seven sheets of stamps in
Davis' stock. In May, postal inspectors determined that
$1,153.30 of Johnson's stamp stock had originated from sources
other than authorized postal channels. Given this and other
evidence (including admissions by Daniels and Johnson), the
arbitrator easily could conclude that the three clerks purchased
stamps from outside sources to replenish Davis' stock prior to
his audit. On that hypothesis, the three audits, even if
conducted on the same day, would likely reveal no major

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have described can take hold on a showing that the arbitral award

was "mistakenly based on a crucial assumption that is concededly

a non-fact," Advest, Inc., 914 F.2d at 8-9, that doctrine is

limited to cases in which no competent evidence of an adjudicated

fact appears in the record. The doctrine has no bearing where,

as here, there is evidence both ways as to the pivotal facts.

We need go no further. Refined to bare essence, the

Union's claim is that the arbitrator found the facts in a clearly

erroneous manner, largely because he believed the "wrong"

witnesses and credited the "wrong" bits of conflicting testimony.

Even if this claim were well-founded and there is not very

much in the record to suggest any egregious factual error we

could not grant the requested relief. See International Bhd of

Firemen & Oilers, Local 261 v. Great Northern Paper Co., 765 F.2d

295, 296 (1st Cir. 1985) (explaining that "courts are precluded

from interfering with arbitration awards for mere errors in

assessing the credibility of witnesses"). It follows inexorably

that we must uphold the district court's rejection of the Union's

challenge to the arbitral award.

Affirmed. See 1st Cir. R. 27.1.

discrepancies.

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