REPRESENTATION ISSUES; SEVERANCE – In General

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Community of interest comprises employee duties, skills, educational requirements, and working conditions, and focuses on inherent aspects of a position rather than employment terms and conditions that are changeable through collective bargaining. (County of Monterey (2022) PERB Decision No. 2821-M, p. 12.) Severance petition which sought to sever classifications from both professional and technical units cannot be appropriate merely because two classifications collaborate more closely with one another than they do with other classifications in their units. Such position would thus destabilize public sector labor relations by fragmenting public entities’ labor force into far more bargaining units than currently exist. Similarly, while public defenders’ and investigators’ skills are complementary and allow them to work toward a common purpose, that is not a basis for finding a community of interest that is so separate and distinct from the employees’ established units that collective bargaining is incapable of addressing the needs of a discrete minority within the existing unit. Moreover, educational requirements for public defenders and investigators are quite different and strongly undercut severance petitioner’s proposed unit. Comparable working conditions, common for professional and non-professional employees working in the same public agency departments, do not undercut the preference for the largest feasible unit with a community of interest, as it does not show that collective bargaining is incapable of adequately serving public defenders in the professional unit and investigators in the technical unit. (pp. 55-60.)