Reported / Citable
Background
Two unions claimed the same maintenance and repair work at SSA Terminals under overlapping collective bargaining agreements. The International Longshore and Warehouse Union and the International Association of Machinists each asserted that its members were contractually entitled to the work. This is a labor “jurisdictional dispute”—a conflict over which group of employees performs particular tasks.
Congress gave the National Labor Relations Board authority under section 10(k) of the National Labor Relations Act to resolve such disputes because an employer caught between competing unions cannot reliably settle the conflict itself. The Board awarded the work to the Machinists. The Longshore union nevertheless pursued a grievance under its contract and obtained an arbitration award, prompting unfair-labor-practice proceedings and consolidated petitions for review and enforcement.
The Court’s Holding
Sitting en banc, the Ninth Circuit denied the Longshore union’s and Pacific Maritime Association’s petitions and enforced the Board’s order. The court held that the International Longshoremen’s Association work-preservation defense does not defeat an unfair-labor-practice charge under section 8(b)(4)(D) when a union refuses to honor the Board’s resolution of a true jurisdictional dispute.
A work-preservation clause generally seeks to protect work historically performed by bargaining-unit employees as technology or operations change. But allowing such a clause to override a section 10(k) award would undermine Congress’s mechanism for conclusively choosing between unions with competing claims. The court distinguished situations in which an employer unilaterally transfers work and thereby creates a dispute from this case, where both unions had genuine contractual claims from the outset.
The en banc court partially overruled its 2020 Kinder Morgan decision to the extent it suggested otherwise. It rejected a proposed special exception for modernization clauses, reasoning that such provisions are common and offer no workable limiting principle. The Board must still consider collective bargaining agreements and define traditional work holistically, especially when technological change drives the dispute, but the losing union cannot circumvent the Board’s allocation through arbitration pressure.
Key Takeaways
- When two unions have genuine competing contractual claims to the same work, the NLRB’s section 10(k) allocation controls the jurisdictional dispute.
- A work-preservation defense does not excuse coercive conduct or refusal to comply with that allocation under section 8(b)(4)(D).
- The Ninth Circuit partially overruled Kinder Morgan, so employers and unions should reassess strategies based on that decision’s broader defense language.
- Modernization clauses remain relevant evidence before the Board, but they do not create a categorical exception to the statutory dispute-resolution scheme.
- The result differs when an employer’s unilateral reassignment creates the purported conflict and the recipient employees have no independent claim to the work.
Why It Matters
The ruling is important for California ports, logistics businesses, and other unionized workplaces where automation and changing job functions produce overlapping work claims. Once the Board decides a genuine jurisdictional dispute, a contrary arbitration remedy cannot be used to force the employer back into the same conflict.
Labor counsel should evaluate whether a controversy is truly between competing unions or instead stems from an employer’s unilateral reassignment. That characterization determines whether the Board’s jurisdictional-dispute framework—and this decision’s limit on work-preservation defenses—applies.