Tim Sandefur has an amusing account of an arbitrator’s appalling decision to reinstate a tollbooth collector fired for shooting paintball guns in moving highway traffic. The arbitrator’s decision is wrong, but I’ll disagree with Tim and agree with the New Jersey Supreme Court’s decision that it’s not the court’s place to substitute their judgment for that of the arbitrator’s. The benefit of having arbitration is the lower cost of ensuring finality in decisions and avoiding litigation, and permitting appeals destroys that benefit if matters are simply going to be relitigated in court. If an arbitrator is consistently more wildly wrong than a litigation system (a questionable proposition) such that those lower costs are not justified by the higher error rate the remedy is to negotiate for different dispute resolution procedures in future union contracts. And that goes even when the arbitrator mistakenly rules in favor of the plaintiff.
New Jersey Turnpike Authority v. Local 196
Tim Sandefur has an amusing account of an arbitrator’s appalling decision to reinstate a tollbooth collector fired for shooting paintball guns in moving highway traffic. The arbitrator’s decision is wrong, but I’ll disagree with Tim and agree with the New Jersey Supreme Court’s decision that it’s not the court’s place to substitute their judgment for […]
5 Comments
I would think that there would be a an alternative route to firing this idiot. Firing paintfalls at vehicles on the highway is presumably a criminal offense, perhaps reckless endangerment. His employer would presumably be on firmer ground firing him as a result of a criminal conviction.
I agree with Ted, both in his criticism of the arbitrator and support for judicial restraint.
In addition to the fact that we don’t want courts reviewing arbitration decisions de novo, we should also applaud the court for refusing to expand public policy based on “amorphous considerations of the common weal.”
(That being said, it’s hard to think of a better example of outcome-based jurisprudence, because the New Jersey Supreme Court is about as reluctant to announce new doctrines of “public policy” as the New York Yankees are to spend money.)
Bad news for you, Bill, they tried that.
The courts held and the prosecutor agreed that the offense didn’t involve his employment sufficiently for a conviction to justify dismissal.
That’s kind of a flabbergasting holding in itself.
In this instance, I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I agree with the union. An employee should not be fired for his off-duty actions. If he had represented himself as an employee at the time of his actions, of course he should be fired. But just because someone does something against the law while on his own time, that doesn’t necessarily justify him being fired from his job. I’m sure there is no clause in his employment agreement that says no arrests of any kind. Wait, he wasn’t even charged with any crime, was he?
What am I missing?
One distinction between the rule of decision MF proposes and the facts is that the tollbooth collector was still wearing his uniform.
Out of uniform, a union rule prohibiting the firing for such behavior bothers me less if and only if the tollbooth collector’s behavior is inadmissible evidence in a suit against the highway authority by a plaintiff injured by the tollbooth collector.