[1995] OLRB Rep. August 1070
0816-95-R United Food & Commercial Workers International Union, Local 175, Applicant v. Fort William Golf & Country Club Limited, Responding Party
BEFORE: Christopher Albertyn, Vice-Chair, and Board Members R. W. Pirrie and P. R. Seville.
APPEARANCES: W. Dubinsky, David Connor, Brad Hill and Rob Meckley for the applicant; Peter Hollinger and Rick Oldale for the responding party.
DECISION OF THE BOARD; August 14, 1995
The Issue
1The style of cause is hereby amended to reflect the correct name of the responding party: "Fort William Golf & Country Club Limited".
2This is an application for certification. The parties have agreed upon all of the matters required in a certification application, save for the determination of the bargaining unit.
3There are three categories of employees at the Fort William Golf & Country Club: the ground staff, the clubhouse staff and the professional's staff. The parties agree that the pro-shop staff are employed by the professional, and not by the responding party. They are irrelevant to this application. The other two categories of employee are relevant to this application. The applicant is applying to represent the ground staff only, but not the clubhouse staff. The applicant contends that the ground staff employees constitute an appropriate bargaining unit. The responding party disputes that. It contends that the ground staff and the clubhouse staff together constitute the appropriate bargaining unit. The resolution of this difference will determine the application. To find the ground staff on their own to be an appropriate bargaining unit will result in the applicant's certification in respect of those employees; to find that the ground staff alone is not an appropriate bargaining unit, and that the appropriate unit is their combination with the clubhouse employees, will result in the dismissal of this application because the applicant is not sufficiently representative of that larger unit to obtain certification.
Facts
4One witness testified, Mr. Oldale, the Secretary/Manager of the Club. He explained that the administration of the Club is divided between the clubhouse operation (the bar and the restaurant) and the golf course operation. He is in charge of the clubhouse operation. The golf course operation falls under the authority of the Greenskeeper, Mr. Deneer. Mr. Oldale and Mr. Deneer each have their own budgets, determined periodically by the Club's Board of Directors. In effect, there are two distinct lines of managerial authority within the Club - one in respect of the ground staff, the other in respect of the hospitality or clubhouse staff.
5The ground staff fall under Mr. Deneer's authority, the clubhouse staff under Mr. Oldale. The ground staff operate from the maintenance buildings, a block situated about 700 yards from the clubhouse, where the clubhouse staff work. The maintenance block houses the maintenance shop and all of the ground staff facilities, including their lunch room, lockers and showers.
6The Club's staff is mainly seasonal. Only the Secretary/Manager, the Greenskeeper, the Bookkeeper and the Mechanic are employed year round. All other staff work during the spring, the summer and the fall. Occasionally they have their contracts extended to perform particular jobs, e.g. a ground staff member was requested to build picnic furniture, which extended his contract by a month or so; the kitchen, catering and cleaning staff of the clubhouse are sometimes offered work over the festive season if the Club is used for Christmas or New Year celebrations.
7Other than the mechanic, of whom more below, the grounds staff have little to do with the clubhouse. They are not permitted to enter there while in their work clothes, although, as club members, when they are not working, they use the clubhouse facilities. The ground staff have occasional contact with the clubhouse during the course of their work. Once in a while they help to lift heavy things, like picnic tables and large liquor deliveries, and they maintain and clean the outside patio area and, at times, the parking lot.
8The work of the ground staff includes filling the water coolers, changing the pin and tee placements as directed by the golf professional, maintaining the greens, supervising the sprinkling and watering of the greens and the fairways, cutting the roughs and mowing the fairways. The ground staff use some expensive equipment, like the greens mowers, tractors, the utility vehicle (which contains a dump truck), the dump trucks, the golf carts and the front-end loader. The daily tasks of the ground staff are allocated to them by the Greenskeeper.
9The Mechanic is a member of the maintenance (ground) staff, under the authority of the Greenskeeper. He happens to be the brother of the Secretary/Manager. He will be part of the bargaining unit contended for by either party. His work is principally concerned with the maintenance and repair of the machinery and equipment used by the ground staff. Once in a while he is needed to perform repair work in the clubhouse or in the pro shop. Such repairs are part of his responsibility, but they occupy a relatively small portion of his actual work time.
10The ground staff are readily distinguishable from the clubhouse staff because they wear a different uniform. The ground staff are required to wear green polo shirts, protected shoes and hard hats. The clubhouse staff (waitresses, bartenders, cleaners and cooks) wear red polo shirts.
11The wages and working hours of the ground staff are set by the Greenskeeper, from his budget. He determines how he will spend his budget, including how many ground staff employees he will employ, what they will be paid, what hours they will work, what leave they will receive, etc. The Secretary/Manager exercises the same discretion in respect of the clubhouse (the cleaning, catering and kitchen) staff. The wages of the ground staff are within a different range from that of the clubhouse staff.
12The work times of the ground staff and of the clubhouse staff are different. The ground staff work from 5.30 a.m. until 2 p.m., preparing the course for the busy period of playing, which is usually the afternoon. They are able to get a lot done in the quiet period, before the course is used, between 5.30 a.m. and about 9 a.m. Some of the clubhouse staff, like the chef and one cleaner, start work earlier, but the bulk of them work between 2:00 p.m. and 3:00 a.m. The consequence i that the ground staff has virtually finished work for the day by the time that the clubhouse staff commence their daily duties.
13In the past decade or so there has been no transfer of employees between the grounds and the clubhouse staff.
14The similarities between the ground staff and the clubhouse staff are the following: they have the same golfing privileges - they can use the course in non-peak times, they can use the clubhouse showers and locker facilities if they are playing golf, and they cannot play in the club tournaments. The financial administration of the clubhouse and of the grounds, and their clerical work, are performed by the Club's bookkeeper, who is responsible to the Secretary/Manager. All of the Club's staff attend the same Christmas party.
15The grounds staff obtain their lunches from the clubhouse and they are charged half price for what they purchase. One of the ground staff collects the food and takes it to the maintenance block, where the ground staff gather and eat lunch together in the lunch room. The clubhouse staff are not charged for the food they consume, mainly because of the administrative difficulty of keeping an accurate record thereof.
16Although co-operation is necessary between the ground staff and the Club's professional, just as it is, to a lesser extent, between the ground staff and the clubhouse staff, to all intents and purposes the grounds staff work separately from the staff of the pro shop and the clubhouse.
Decision
17The Club is concerned that certification of the Union in respect of the limited bargaining unit sought by the Union, viz, the ground staff only, will remove management's capacity to easily assign work to the ground staff, including work in or around the clubhouse, in the manner it has been able to until now. Management is wary of rigid job classifications which may impede management's capacity readily to assign employees in an optimal manner.
18Prior to dealing with the merits of the application, we consider it necessary to correct a misapprehension of the Club's management. It believes that its right to assign the work it currently assigns to the ground staff will be trammeled by the Union's certification. That is not so. The status quo is that the Club's management is able to assign members of the ground staff to perform any outdoors work, any heavy indoors or repair work and other work which is more appropriately done by the ground staff than by the hospitality staff. Unless management waives any of its current rights in a collective agreement to be concluded with the Union, management will retain the mobility rights it currently possesses to assign work. Furthermore, it is common in collective agreements for an article to provide for management's right to assign work in the manner it requires, and for there to be job assignment flexibility to ensure adequate mobility. There is nothing precluding the Club from proposing that such an article be included in any agreement it concludes with the Union.
19The responding party submitted that the larger bargaining unit it proposed, of the hospitality and ground staff together, was a better bargaining unit than that sought by the applicant. In all likelihood that is probably so, particularly as the Board's most standard unit is an all-employee unit (Sifton Properties Limited, [1993] OLRB Rep. Oct. 1010 at 1016 paragraph 33). But that is not the test stipulated in section 6(1) the Act. We are not asked to decide what is the most appropriate bargaining unit. There is also no presumption in favour of the most comprehensive unit (K Mart Limited, [1981] OLRB Rep. Sept. 1250, at 1256 paragraph 14). The Board's function is to determine whether the bargaining unit proposed by the applicant is one that is an appropriate unit for the purpose of collective bargaining. In other words, our function is not to determine what is the optimal or the most suitable bargaining unit, but rather whether the unit proposed by the applicant is viable in the sense that the employees in the proposed unit have a distinctive community of interest and there are unlikely to be serious labour relations problems as a result of the certification of the applicant union in respect of that unit. See in this regard the following passage from Homewood Health Centre, [1992] OLRB Rep. February 181, at 184 paragraph 4:
…….Indeed, broader groupings are generally more desirable than narrower ones, because they avoid the labour relations problems associated with fragmented bargaining structures ... But these general considerations should not be elevated to the level of legal rules or become the focus of litigation. It a union applies for certification for a unit which is appropriate, it is entitled to that unit even though there is a plausible alternative description which would also be appropriate.
20We are satisfied that there is a community of interest between the members of the ground staff. They perform the same kind of work, their conditions of employment are commensurate, they work together during the same hours each day, their skills are relatively similar, they work from the same geographic location, they perceive themselves and they are perceived as a distinct group of employees, they are substantially inter-dependent upon each other and they fall under the same managerial authority. Moreover they have signified their wish to exercise their right to bargain collectively as a distinct grouping (Canada Trustco Mortgage Company, [1977] OLRB Rep. June 330).
21There is no such community of interest between the ground staff and the clubhouse staff. In virtually all significant aspects of their work they are distinct. They work from different locations, their shifts cover different times of the day, they seldom meet or interact, there is very little inter-dependence between them and no interchange, their conditions of employment are set by different managerial structures of authority, their apparel is distinct and their work conditions are different. Perhaps most significantly, the remuneration of the ground staff falls within a distinct budget, which is separate from the budget which applies to the clubhouse operation. In short, there is virtually no community of interest between the ground staff and the clubhouse staff.
22There was no persuasive evidence of probable labour relations problems arising from certification of the bargaining unit sought by the applicant. (See, in this regard, the Board's comments in Active Mold Plastic Products Ltd., (1994] OLRB Rep. June 617, at 625, paragraph 30). Rather, the evidence, although tangential, inclined towards the lack of any likelihood of labour relations difficulties being caused by the recognition of the ground staff as a distinct bargaining unit.
23Having regard to the labour relations implications of the ground staff constituting a separate bargaining unit, the Board is satisfied that there ought not to be significant adverse labour relations effects. The difference between the ground staff and the hospitality staff is not merely a classification difference - the difference goes to the root of the organization of work and administration within the Club. The ground staff are a distinctive production unit within the Club, and their constitution as a bargaining unit will merely mirror that production unit. There will be no fragmentation of labour relations within the Club by recognizing the grounds staff as a distinct bargaining unit because they already constitute a separate and distinct working unit.
24There is no reasonable fear of labour-management problems, or of tension between the ground and the hospitality staff, or of an escalation of industrial conflict, by the Board's recognition of the ground staff as a distinct bargaining unit. The division between them and the hospitality staff is such that that recognition merely gives effect to what is a defacto division already.
25The test applied by the Board is that stated in The Hospital for Sick Children v Group of Employees, (1985] OLRB Rep. February 266, at 277, in paragraph 23:
[D]oes the unit which the union seeks to represent encompass a group of employees with a sufficiently coherent community of interest that they can bargain together on a viable basis without at the same time causing serious labour relations problems for the employer.
26On the basis of that test, the Board is satisfied that the bargaining unit proposed by the applicant is coherent and viable and that its recognition by the Board is unlikely to cause significant labour relations problems.
27The Board finds that the applicant is a trade union within the meaning of section 1(1) of the Labour Relations Act.
28The Board is satisfied, on the basis of all the evidence before it, that more than fifty-five per cent of the employees of the responding party in the bargaining unit on May 19, 1995, the certification application date, had applied to become members of the applicant on or before that date.
29A certificate will issue in respect of the following bargaining unit:
all ground staff employees, including the mechanic, employed at the Fort William Golf & Country Club in the City of Thunder Bay, save and except the grounds superintendent (also known as the greenskeeper) and persons above the rank of the grounds superintendent.
Clarity note: the ground staff excludes any of the clubhouse or hospitality staff (waiters, bartenders, cooks, cleaners and the pro shop employees.)