St. Joseph Home for Children, Inc.

National Labor Relations Board - Board Decisions

Jun 23, 1976

224 N.L.R.B. 1616 (N.L.R.B. 1976)

1616 DECISIONS OF NATIONAL LABOR RELATIONS BOARD
St. Joseph Home for Children , Inc. and Local 164,
International Brotherhood of Teamsters, Chauf-
feurs, Warehousemen and Helpers of America, Ind.,
Petitioner . Case 7-RC-13346
June 23, 1976
DECISION AND DIRECTION OF ELECTION
BY MEMBERS JENKINS, PENELLO, AND WALTHER
Upon a petition duly filed under Section 9(c) of
the National Labor Relations Act, as amended, a
hearing was held before Hearing Officer Christopher
Honeyman on December 3, 1975. Following the
hearing, and pursuant to Section 102.67 of the Na-
tional Labor Relations Board Rules and Regulations,
Series 8, as amended, the Regional Director for Re-
gion 7 transferred this case to the National Labor
Relations Board for decision. Thereafter, the Em-
ployer filed a brief.
Pursuant to the provisions of Section 3(b) of the
National Labor Relations Act, as amended, the Na-
tional Labor Relations Board has delegated its au-
thority in this proceeding to a three-member panel.
The Board has reviewed the Hearing Officer's rul-
ings made at the hearing, and finds that they are free
from prejudicial error. The rulings are hereby af-
firmed.
Upon the entire record in this case, including the
Employer's brief, the Board finds:
1. The Employer is a Michigan nonprofit corpora-
tion, owned and operated by the Felician Sisters of
Livonia, a Catholic order. The Employer operates a
licensed child welfare facility for the residential care
of neglected, dependent, and abused children be-
tween the ages of 6 and 13. Presently, 17 children,
referred from various agencies, live at the home.
The children residing at the home have parents un-
willing, incapable, or unfit to care for them. The chil-
dren have been placed in the home by the State in
order to prepare them for adoption, foster care, or
eventual return home at a proper time. In some
cases, a child must be sent to another institution.
The children stay at the home an average of 10 or
11 months. During that time, the child is provided
with a family-type atmosphere designed to fulfill his
or her physical, emotional, and personal needs. Full-
or part-time educational instruction is provided at
the home for those children who, because of a severe
truancy problem in the past, are unable to function
at the proper grade level in the public school system.
Those children capable of attending public school do
SO.
Although some of the children have emotional
problems, the home does not accept badly disturbed
children as residents. None of the children is mental-
ly retarded, and none has any physical disabilities.
Although the home has a nurse on the staff and a
small dispensary among its facilities, only minor ail-
ments of the residents are treated at the home. For
consultation concerning any severe medical or psy-
chological problem, the children are sent to a physi-
cian or an agency in the community. A child psychia-
trist does, however, visit the home three times a
month for 2 hours at a time for any child in need of
psychiatric attention.
The Employer received $303,783, in total income
in 1974. Almost all of this income was derived from
the State of Michigan and private donations from
within the State. Of its $359,991 in operating expen-
ses for 1974 (there was a deficit of $56,208), the Em-
ployer spent approximately $35,000 to purchase
goods and services indirectly from out of State.
The Employer contends that the Board should not
assert jurisdiction in this case because St. Joseph
Home for Children is a nonprofit, noncommercial,
charitable institution. The Board declined to assume
jurisdiction over such employers in Ming Quong
Children's Center, 210 NLRB 899 (1974).
However, we recently decided in The Rhode Island
Catholic Orphan Asylum a/k/a St. Aloysius Home,
224 NLRB 1344 (1976), that in view of the 1974
health care amendments to the Act,' we would assert
jurisdiction over any employer, charitable or not, if
other appropriate jurisdictional standards are satis-
fied. We concluded in St. Aloysius that, since Con-
gress had required the Board to assume jurisdiction
over both charitable and noncharitable health care
institutions, it would not be proper to continue to
exempt charitable, nonprofit, nonhealth care institu-
tions from the coverage of the Act.
St. Aloysius, in fact, involved an institution similar
to the one operated by this Employer. St Aloysius
Home was a residential care facility for children with
behavorial problems who were placed in the home by
the State of Rhode Island. The purpose of the home
was to work with the children and their families so
that the children could return home at an appropri-
ate time. On the basis of these facts, we also decided
in St. Aloysius to assert jurisdiction over all institu-
tions providing specialized care and custody for chil-
dren, and having a gross annual income of more than
$250,000.
Therefore, in view of the fact that St. Joseph Home
for Children is an institution for the specialized care
and custody of children, and that it has gross annual
1 Public Law 93-360 (July 26, 1974)
224 NLRB No. 187
ST JOSEPH HOME FOR CHILDREN, INC 1617
revenues in excess of $250,000, we shall assert juris-
diction herein
2 The labor organization involved claims to rep-
resent certain employees of the Employer
3 A question affecting commerce exists concern-
ing the representation of employees of the Employer
within the meaning of Sections 9(c)(1) and 2(6) and
(7) of the Act
4 The unit, as amended at the hearing and
claimed appropriate by the Petitioner, is as follows
All full-time and regular part-time child care
workers, cooks, caretakers, housekeepers and
laundry employees, maintenance men, and
teacher aides, excluding office clerical employ-
ees and supervisors as defined in the Act
The Employer agrees that this unit is appropriate,
except that it contends that the child care workers
should be excluded from the unit, because they are
professionals and because they have no community
of interest with the other employees in the unit
The record shows that five full-time child care
workers are assigned to particular children in one of
the Employer's three residential units They work
with the children from the time they return from
school until bedtime, always following a prearranged
schedule of activity for each child Three part-time
child care workers relieve the full-time employees on
weekends and on other days off All the child care
workers are supervised by two social workers, and
none has the authority to deviate from the activity
schedule set up for each child, except in minor re-
spects
The child care workers are expected to have an
associate degree (2 years of college) in a field such as
sociology, psychology, or social work Also, each
worker must do the work necessary to receive a child
care certificate, which is granted after satisfactory
completion of a 28-week, once-a-week course offered
by the Michigan Association of Children's Agencies
The child care workers and the other employees of
the Employer in the proposed unit work at the same
site Wages for all the employees are set by the
home's administrator, and all employees are paid on
an hourly basis All the employees have the same
benefits, including hospitalization and workmen's
compensation coverage, paid holidays, and sick
leave The nonchild care workers are supervised by
the administrator of the home, while, as noted, the
two social workers supervise the child care workers
On these facts, we conclude that the child care
workers are not professional employees within the
meaning of Section 2(12) of the Act, and that they do
have a community of interest with the other employ-
ees in the proposed appropriate unit Therefore, we
shall include them in the unit
The duties of the child care workers, as indicated,
are routine in nature They are required to follow a
strict schedule of activities in working with the chil-
dren, and have no authority to deviate from it in any
important way While some specialized training is re-
quired for the position, it appears to be insubstantial,
especially in view of the actual nature of the work
performed See The Menninger Foundation, 219
NLRB 690 (1975), in which we decided that child
care workers, along with other categories of employ-
ees, did not constitute an appropriate unit separate
and apart from all the service and maintenance em-
ployees in a psychiatric hospital
Except for different supervision of the child care
workers, the facts stated above demonstrate that the
working conditions of all the employees in the pro-
posed unit are virtually the same
Therefore, the following employees constitute an
appropriate unit for the purposes of collective bar-
gaining within the meaning of Section 9(b) of the
Act
All full-time and regular part-time child care
workers, cooks, caretakers, housekeepers and
laundry employees, maintenance men, and
teacher aides, excluding office clerical employ-
ees and supervisors as defined in the Act
[Direction of Election and Excelsior footnote omit-
ted from publication I
MEMBER PENELLO dissenting
I dissent on the jurisdictional issue for the reasons
set forth in Chairman Murphy's and my dissenting
opinion in The Rhode Island Catholic Orphan Asylum
a/k/a St Aloysius Home, 224 NLRB 1344 (1976)
For that reason, I find it unnecessary to reach the
unit question presented