Black v. Cutter Laboratories

''SCHAUER, J. Cutter Laboratories, Inc., appeals from a judgment entered upon the granting of an order confirming the award of an arbitration board. (See Code Civ. Proc., §§ 1291-1293.) By the award, rendered by two of the three arbitrators with the third dissenting, it was held that appellant (hereinafter sometimes termed the company) had discharged one of its employes in violation of a collective bargaining agreement between appellant and the Bio-Lab Union (hereinafter sometimes called the union) of Local 225, United Office and Professional Workers of America, and that the employe was entitled to reinstatement and to back pay limited by the bargaining agreement to eight weeks regular pay less any outside earnings or unemployment compensation received during such period. We have concluded that, upon the undisputed evidence and upon the facts found by the arbitration board, the company is correct in its contention that the arbitrators exceeded their powers, that the award is contrary to law, that it would'contravene public policy for the courts of this state to enforce reinstatement of the discharged employe, and that the judgment must therefore be reversed.

From extensive findings made by the arbitration board it appears that the employer, Cutter Laboratories, Inc., with offices and laboratories located in Berkeley, manufactures and sells throughout the United States and certain foreign countries vaccines, serums, antitoxins and other antibiotics for both civilian and military use. During World War II [791]the company was subject to stringent security control by federal authorities, and its products and processes are said to be peculiarly subject to sabotage. Since World War II the company has been under no specific contract obligation to any governmental agency to discharge employes who are “bad security risks”; any obligation to take such steps grows out of the duties it owes generally to its customers, its dealers, its employes, and its stockholders.

The Bio-Lab Union of Local 225, United Office and Professional Workers of America C.I.O., was recognized in February, 1944, by the company pursuant to a National Labor Relations Board election. It is a union “generally denominated as 'left-wing”’ and it as well as the U.O.P.W.A. was expelled from the C.I.O. in March, 1950.

The discharged employe, Mrs. Doris Walker, graduated from the University of California School of Jurisprudence in 1942, and is an active member of The State Bar of California. She was elected to Phi Beta Kappa and to the editorial board of the California Law Review. From 1942 to 1944 she was employed as an enforcement attorney with the federal Office of Price Administration in San Francisco and from 1944 to 1946 as an attorney with a firm of lawyers in the same city. She left the law firm and secured employment as a cannery worker sorting and trimming vegetables in three canneries in Oakland and San Francisco and (later in 1946) as an organizer for the Food and Tobacco and Agricultural Workers Union. She testified that she went to law school “because I was interested in becoming a labor lawyer” and that she left the law firm because her “time was spent on routine civil matters . . . and I became dissatisfied with my work and felt that I would rather take a more active role in the field in which I was interested and so I quit in order to take a job in a plant.”