General Electric Co.

National Labor Relations Board - Board Decisions

Feb 9, 1970

181 N.L.R.B. 33 (N.L.R.B. 1970)

GENERAL ELECTRIC COMPANY 33
General Electric Company, Apollo Systems' and
International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers,
AFL-CIO, Petitioner . Case 12-RC-3342
February 9, 1970
DECISION AND ORDER
BY MEMBERS FANNING, BROWN, AND JENKINS
Upon a petition duly filed under Section 9(c) of
the National Labor Relations Act, as amended, a
hearing was held on July 22, 23, 28, and 29, 1969,
before Hearing Officer Robert G. Romano of the
National Labor Relations Board. The Employer and
the Petitioner have each filed briefs.
Pursuant to the provisions of Section 3(b) of the
Act, the Board has delegated its powers in
connection with this case to a three-member panel.
The Board has reviewed the Hearing Officer's
rulings, and finds that they are free from prejudicial
error. They are hereby affirmed.
Upon the entire record in this case, the Board
finds:
1. The Employer is engaged in commerce within
the meaning of the Act, and it will effectuate the
policies of the Act to assert jurisdiction herein.
2. The labor organization involved claims to
represent certain employees of the Employer.
3. No question affecting commerce exists
concerning the representation of certain employees
of the Employer within the meaning of Section
9(c)(1) and Section 2(6) and (7) of the Act.
The Petitioner seeks a unit of approximately 44
nonexempt salaried employees,' but excluding 2
secretaries, in the Employer's Data Processing
Operations, hereinafter referred to as Unit 118, and
excluding all technical and professional employees in
the Employer's Daytona Beach facility. In the
alternative, the Petitioner, before the Hearing
Officer and in its brief, expressed a continued
interest in a broadened unit which would include the
above-mentioned employees and other employees
"who directly perform and function on data
processing equipment" and who are assigned to
other organizational units or departments of the
Employer at its Daytona Beach operations.3 The
Employer took the position that the requested unit
and the expanded unit proposed by the Petitioner
are clearly inappropriate because they include only a
portion of the Employer's personnel engaged in
office clerical-type work including data processing
and handling; but otherwise the Employer took no
position as to what would constitute an appropriate
unit. There is no bargaining history for any
employees at the Daytona Beach facility.
'The Employer's name appears as amended at the hearing.
'The parties refer to "non-exempt salaried" personnel as meaning
employees covered by the provisions of the Fair Labor Standards Act
'At the hearing, the Petitioner partially identified these additional
employees in the following categories : flexowriters, in Unit 201; data
The Employer, I of approximately 150 operating
departments4 within the General Electric Company,
has its headquarters in Daytona Beach, Florida, and
maintains 9 branch locations in Florida, California,
Texas, New York, Louisiana, and Alabama. The
Daytona Beach facility is engaged almost exclusively
in complex data analysis and research for the
Employer's business and management support
systems and related NASA-sensitive activities.
Systemwide, the Employer has approximately
5,167 employees, including the 1,795 employees
located at Daytona Beach. Of the latter, figure
about 1,266 of the Employer's employees at its
headquarters are classified as either professional and
technical personnel or as production, maintenance
and plant clerical employees and are not in issue in
this case. The remaining 429 employees, all of
whom are nonexempt and salaried, are located in
the Employer's seven Daytona Beach buildings in
more than 100 organizational units and are engaged
primarily in office clerical work, including data
processing and handling. It is from this last group
that the Petitioner requests a unit of 44 employees,
excluding 2 secretaries, in the Employer's
organizational Unit 118, Data Processing
Operations.
The record shows that among the 44 employees in
Unit 118 there are 17 computer operators, 14
keypunch operators, 3 certifier operators, 2 tape
librarians, 4 control clerks computer operations, 3
output assemblers, and 1 inventory and control
clerk. In addition, the two secretaries which the
Petitioner seeks to include are also assigned to and
work in Unit 118. These employees work within a
limited access area,5 which houses several computers
and tab machines. The GE 635 computer,
programmed to perform data processing functions in
the third generation phase," is the most sophisticated
hardware located in Unit 118. Its attendant
"peripherals," machines used for the inputting of
data originating locally, include card readers,
punches, and printers. Through a mediary computer
known as a DATANET-30, the GE 635 is also
programmed to receive input data from remote
access terminals located either in other
organizational units at Daytona Beach or, and more
commonly, located at branch facilities of the
Employer.
processing technician , in Unit 471; keypunch operators , in Unit 622,
machine aided draftsmen and machine aided computer application
technician , in Unit 662; engineering programming technicians , in Unit 612,
and computer application technicians , in Unit 695
'It appears that a "department " is the lowest managerial echelon within
the General Electric Company where profit and loss responsibility is given
A "unit ," on the other hand , is the lowest supervised level within a
department's managerial hierarchy
'For reasons largely due to maintaining computer hardware in a clean,
controlled , air-conditioned environment , and in part due to the sensitive
data handled therein , Unit 118 and some other units, are semirestricted to
outside employees and do maintain separate lunchrooms However , outside
employees regularly interface with personnel in limited access units on a
daily basis when data is being processed.
'It appears that devising executive programs capable of coordinating
181 NLRB No. 5
34 DECISIONS OF NATIONAL LABOR RELATIONS BOARD
Despite the complex data analyses which these
computers perform, the operator's job, at best, calls
for the exercise of minimal discretion on his part.
Also, the record shows that the computer operator
is only occasionally involved in manning the GE 635
console, and then under the supervision of a
specialist, an exempt employee. The bulk of the
operator's time is occupied in jobs of a clerical
nature; mounting tapes and running the peripheral
machinery including card punches, printers, and
readers. The duties performed (e.g., keypunching) by
other employees in Unit 118 are also of a routine,
clerical nature. Further, the record reveals that there
are computers and tab machines in other units at
the Daytona Beach facility which clearly demand
the same skills and experience; indeed, the record
amply reveals that many employees in other units
perform virtually the same type of work as do those
in the requested unit.
The record shows that other than a high school
education' no special qualifications are required to
secure a position in Unit 118 or other units which
appear to have some involvement with data
processing and handling work.8 The Employer has
initiated courses of instruction in these fields which
are offered on a voluntary basis, after hours, and
open to exempt and nonexempt employees alike.
However, while successful completion of one or
more of these courses enhances an employee's
opportunity to transfer into Unit 118 or any other
data handling or processing unit , it is not deemed to
be a prerequisite to transferring. In a similar vein,
simultaneously the functioning of several serial application programs is
solely within the domain of exempt personnel . In simplified terms, the
"software ," or executive program of a third generation computer, is
capable of directing the computer to decide whether a job is to be
performed in sequence or concurrently , or deciding whether a job is to be
aborted , and imparting this "housekeeping" information on printed form
to the operator with instructions , for example, to mount additional tapes
'A number of nonexempt salaried employees have had some college
education and many have acquired work -related experience before joining
the Employer
'In this regard the Employer offered evidence showing that about 100
additional employees located in 50-odd units were "significantly involved"
with data processing
the record shows that of the 44 employees the
Petitioner seeks more than one-third came from
other units within the last 3 years, and over the
same period 7 nonexempt salaried employees
transferred from Unit 118 to other units. In terms
of salary, the record is inconclusive, and does not
clearly establish that employees in the requested unit
receive salaries different from those received by
other employees; in fact, except for minor
variations, the corporatewide salary scales and
employment policies and benefits affecting all the
Employer's nonexempt salaried personnel are
identical.
Based on the above, and consistent with Board
policy,' we find that the employees in the requested
unit do not possess a sufficient separate community
of interest to warrant their inclusion in a separate
unit appropriate for collective-bargaining purposes.
In particular, we rely on the close integration of the
Employer's operations, the similarity in skills and
experience involved, which we deem to be of a
clerical nature, and the apparent transferability of
personnel into and out of the requested unit. On
balance, we feel these considerations, including the
exclusion of salaried nonexempt employees from the
requested unit , outweigh, those emphasized by the
Petitioner, namely, the separate limited access work
area, separate lunchroom, some difference in hours
of work, and limited physical interfacing with other
employees. As for the Petitioner's alternate
requested unit , we, as it correctly admitted in its
brief, "cannot conceive any basis upon which the
Board might establish such a unit."
We find, therefore, that the unit sought is too
narrow in scope to be appropriate. Accordingly, we
shall dismiss the petition.
ORDER
It is hereby ordered that the petition herein be,
and it hereby is, dismissed.
'See The Ohio Casualty Insurance Company. 175 NLRB No 140, The
Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company, 168 NLRB No. 25, and cases cited
therein