REMEDIES FOR UNFAIR PRACTICES; INJUNCTIVE RELIEF – Standards for Obtaining Injunctive Relief

Single Topic for Decision I063E

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Injunctive relief is just and proper when an employer is using a company union to hinder an outside union’s efforts to organize its employees. Here, injunctive relief was necessary to prevent the school district’s ongoing unfair practices from eroding support for the charging party nonexclusive representative while PERB adjudicates the underlying unfair practice charges. Since 1977 the school district has treated the existing nonexclusive representative as the representative of its teachers. The school district negotiates wage and benefit changes with the existing nonexclusive representative, and grants it preferential access to meetings, school sites, and the school district’s e-mail system—access it has not granted to the rival nonexclusive representative. The school district also fully funds the existing nonexclusive representative’s operations, pays stipends to its representatives, and provides office space. The existing nonexclusive representative is deeply entrenched as the school district’s longstanding preferred employee organization. Against this backdrop, the school district’s recent communications suggest that the existing nonexclusive representative would be a better representative because of its existing close relationship with school district administration, and explicitly state the school district remains opposed to true collective bargaining. Without an injunction, the school district could continue to use the existing nonexclusive representative as a cudgel to crush the rival nonexclusive representative’s organizing efforts. If those efforts were extinguished before PERB could resolve the underlying unfair practice charges, any remedy PERB could order at the conclusion of its adjudication process would be meaningless. (pp. 38-39.) Thus, injunctive relief was appropriate.