< Back to front page Text size – +

T given power to bypass union rules to end bias in workplace

E-mail|Link|Comments () June 4, 2009 12:09 PM

By John R. Ellement, Globe Staff

The state's highest court ruled today that the MBTA can bypass union seniority when the public transit agency moves to end discrimination in its ranks.

In a complex case aimed at drawing a line between union contracts and management efforts to end bias against women, minorities, and the disabled, the Supreme Judicial Court said protecting people from discrimination must override seniority rules.

The case involved William Wick, who was denied a job in 1999 as a rail repairman when he failed a hearing test. Wick won a favorable ruling from the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination, and the T agreed to hire him in 2004 and made his start date 1999, which gave him five years of seniority.

Boston Carmen's Union Local 589 saw the Wick settlement as a violation of their contract and convinced both an arbitrator and a Suffolk Superior Court judge to overturn the Wick settlement.

But the unanimous SJC said today that T management made the right call.

"Where the settlement is presumptively legitimate, and where the union has not shown that the settlement was a sham and in derogation of the collective bargaining agreement, public policy required the collective bargaining agreement to yield to Wick's settlement agreement,'' Justice Francis X. Spina wrote for the court.

He added, "the arbitrator's decision to the contrary effectively perpetuates the MBTA's likely discriminatory conduct and it effectively deprives Wick of the remedy to which he is entitled: retroactive seniority. It therefore violates public policy.''

In the second half of the case, the SJC said the union, the arbitrator, and the Superior Court judge got it right. The T should have negotiated with its unions before it scrapped a promotion list for "spare'' bus inspectors in 2001.

At the time, the T was still being watched by the attorney general's office because of chronic bias in the agency.

But the SJC said there was no evidence that the T's actions caused discrimination or eliminated bias. And without that evidence, the T must negotiate the issue with the union in contract talks, and cannot act on its own.

"Although the MBTA was free to alter or modify the criteria it used to appoint persons to the spare inspector master list, as it alone determined, once the appointment was made, seniority status attached and the MBTA could not unilaterally strip employees of that status,'' Spina wrote.

He added, "the appropriate procedure would have been to enter negotiations with the union.''