UNPUBLISHED
UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS
FOR THE FOURTH CIRCUIT
No. 11-1766
INTERMET CORPORATION,
Petitioner - Appellee,
v.
UNITED STEEL, PAPER AND FORESTRY, RUBBER, MANUFACTURING,
ENERGY, ALLIED INDUSTRIAL AND SERVICE WORKERS INTERNATIONAL
UNION; UNITED STEEL WORKERS OF AMERICA LOCAL UNION 8270,
Respondents - Appellants.
Appeal from the United States District Court for the Western
District of Virginia, at Lynchburg. Norman K. Moon, Senior
District Judge. (6:10-mc-00007-NKM)
Argued: March 23, 2012 Decided: April 5, 2012
Before WILKINSON, MOTZ, and DUNCAN, Circuit Judges.
Reversed and remanded by unpublished per curiam opinion.
ARGUED: Amanda Marie Fisher, UNITED STEELWORKERS OF AMERICA,
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, for Appellants. Christopher M.
Michalik, MCGUIREWOODS, LLP, Richmond, Virginia, for Appellee.
ON BRIEF: Melissa Wolf Riley, MCGUIREWOODS, LLP,
Charlottesville, Virginia, for Appellee.
Unpublished opinions are not binding precedent in this circuit.
PER CURIAM:
Two unions appeal from a district court’s grant of summary
judgment vacating an arbitrator’s award under a collective
bargaining agreement. Because the arbitrator acted within the
scope of his powers under the collective bargaining agreement,
we reverse the judgment of the district court and remand the
case for entry of an order enforcing the arbitration award.
I.
Intermet Corp. (“Intermet”) declared bankruptcy in July
2009 and closed its Archer Creek foundry in Campbell County,
Virginia in December 2009. In doing so, it terminated the
employment of roughly 170 persons as of December 26, 2009.
Intermet refused to pay vacation benefits assertedly due to the
employees for the time they worked in 2009 because it took the
position that such benefits were not due under the collective
bargaining agreement (“CBA”) unless the workers were employed on
December 31, 2009.
Two unions, the United Steel, Paper and Forestry, Rubber,
Manufacturing, Energy, Allied Industrial and Service Workers
International Union and the United Steel Workers of America
Local Union 8270, represented workers at the foundry negotiating
the CBA. The unions filed a class action grievance pursuant to
the CBA, and submitted the dispute for arbitration.
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Article 11 of the CBA governs the accrual and distribution
of vacation benefits. Section 5 of Article 11, upon which
Intermet chiefly relies, provides that “[t]o be eligible for
vacation benefits during any calendar year, an employee must be
actively employed on December 31 of the preceding year.”
Article 11 contains several other provisions which, in some
circumstances, allow an employee to claim vacation benefits even
if not employed on December 31 of the preceding year.
The arbitrator concluded that Intermet’s refusal to pay
vacation benefits earned in 2009 violated Article 11 of the CBA.
The arbitrator reasoned that, in negotiating the CBA, the
parties had not contemplated how vacation benefits would be
apportioned in the event of plant closure and that Section 5 did
not apply to the circumstance of a plant closure. Moreover, the
arbitrator found that the vacation benefits were “a bargained
for benefit” and that “according to the . . . language of the
Parties Agreement, this entitlement had already been earned.”
Intermet brought this action in district court seeking to
vacate the arbitrator’s award; the unions counterclaimed to
enforce the award. After the parties filed cross-motions for
summary judgment, the district court ruled in favor of Intermet,
vacating the award. The court found that the CBA required a
person to be employed on December 31, 2009 to be entitled to
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vacation pay accrued by virtue of working during that year. The
unions noted a timely appeal.
We review the judgment of the district court de novo.
Parsons v. Power Mountain Coal Co., 604 F.3d 177, 182 (4th Cir.
2010).
II.
“Judicial review of arbitration awards is among the
narrowest known to the law.” PPG Indus. v. Int’l Chem. Workers,
587 F.3d 648, 652 (4th Cir. 2009) (internal alterations and
quotation marks omitted). A court must “determine only whether
the arbitrator did his job -- not whether he did it well,
correctly, or reasonably, but simply whether he did it.”
Mountaineer Gas Co. v. Oil, Chem. & Atomic Workers Int'l Union,
76 F.3d 606, 608 (4th Cir. 1996).
An arbitrator’s award may be vacated only if “it violates
clearly established public policy, fails to draw its essence
from the collective bargaining agreement, or reflects merely the
arbitrator’s personal notions of right and wrong.” Yuasa, Inc.
v. Int’l Union of Elec., Elec., Salaried, Mach. & Furniture
Workers, 224 F.3d 316, 321 (4th Cir. 2000) (internal quotation
marks omitted). “[A]s long as the arbitrator is even arguably
construing or applying the contract and acting within the scope
of his authority,” a court cannot overturn the arbitrator’s
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award even if the court “is convinced [the arbitrator] committed
serious error.” United Paperworkers Int’l Union v. Misco, Inc.,
484 U.S. 29, 38 (1987).
Intermet contends that the CBA does not require the payment
of vacation benefits to anyone that was not employed on December
31 of the year. By contrast, the unions contend that the CBA
requires the payment of vacation benefits in the event of plant
closure provided that the employees worked the minimum number of
hours required. This is a quintessential dispute “as to the
meaning, interpretation and application of the collective
bargaining agreement” that is squarely within the power of the
arbitrator to adjudicate and that courts “have no business
weighing the merits of.” United Steelworkers of Am. v. Am. Mfg.
Co., 363 U.S. 564, 568-69 (1960) (internal quotation marks
omitted).
We need not address whether we would have reached the same
conclusion as the arbitrator in interpreting the CBA. Rather,
we must only satisfy ourselves that the arbitrator “acted within
the scope of his authority under the contract.” PPG Indus., 587
F.3d at 650. Of course, the CBA provides that “[t]he arbitrator
shall have no power to add to, subtract from or modify this
Agreement in any way, but shall instead be limited to the
application of the terms of this Agreement in determining the
dispute.” The arbitrator acknowledged these limits on his role,
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making clear in his decision that his duty was to “determine how
the negotiators would have decided this case, based solely on
the written language of the Parties Agreement.” He further
recognized that his role was “confined to the four corners of
the Parties Wage Agreement” and “to interpret the meaning and
intent of” that agreement.
The district court’s judgment vacating the arbitrator’s
award rests principally on the court’s determination that “there
was no ambiguity in the [CBA] requirement that ‘[t]o be eligible
for vacation benefits . . . an employee must be actively
employed on December 31 . . . .’” While it is true that “the
arbitrator cannot ‘ignore the plain language of the contract’ to
impose his ‘own notions of industrial justice,’” PPG Indus., at
652 (citing Misco, 484 U.S. at 38), the arbitrator did not do
that here.
Article 11 of the CBA does not address how vacation
benefits are apportioned in the event of a plant closure.
Although the CBA is specific as to how vacation benefits are
distributed in the case of retirement, discharge for cause,
death, and layoffs, it is silent as to the circumstance of a
plant closure. Moreover, given that some workers, like those
that are laid off, are entitled to vacation benefits even though
not actively employed on December 31, it is not at all clear
that the December 31 trigger date applies in all circumstances.
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The arbitrator found that when Intermet and the unions
established the December 31 trigger date, “bankruptcy was not
part and parcel to those discussions,” and that “bankruptcy was
not one of the provisions included in [the] December 31 trigger
date.” Thus, based on the “structure of the Parties Agreement,”
the arbitrator concluded that the vacation pay was “a bargained
for benefit . . . based on work performed in the preceding
year,” and Intermet’s employees were thus entitled to it if they
met the other requirements of Article 11.
As in PPG Industries, “the arbitrator found the terms of
the CBA ambiguous, and this court cannot second-guess that
judgment.” 587 F.3d at 654. In the absence of a clear
provision, the arbitrator resolved the dispute in light of the
whole agreement and his interpretation of the intent of the
negotiators. That, he was entitled to do. See N. Ind. Pub.
Serv. Co. v. United Steelworkers of Am., 243 F.3d 345, 348 (7th
Cir. 2001) (“[A]rbitrators are empowered to fill gaps left in
contracts.”); CSX Transp., Inc. v. United Transp. Union, 29 F.3d
931, 936 (4th Cir. 1994) (“If the parties’ written agreement is
ambiguous or silent regarding the parties’ intent, the
arbitrator may use past practices and bargaining history to
‘fill a gap’ in the written contract.” (internal citation
omitted)).
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III.
Accordingly, we reverse the judgment of the district court
and remand the case for entry of an order enforcing the
arbitration award.
REVERSED AND REMANDED
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