Background
The Cuyahoga County Juvenile Court entered into two collective-bargaining agreements with Laborers’ International Union of North America Local 860, covering detention-center employees and other juvenile-court employees. Each agreement stated that it remained effective through December 31, 2019, included an evergreen provision requiring the court to recognize the union and follow the agreement until a successor agreement, union disclaimer, or employee decertification, and required arbitration of disputes over interpreting or applying the agreements.
After negotiations for successor agreements failed, Administrative Judge Thomas F. O’Malley sued for declarations that the agreements expired in 2019 or were void from inception because the evergreen provisions lacked consideration and improperly bound the court indefinitely. Local 860 filed a grievance after the juvenile court announced it would no longer recognize the union or process grievances, then sought to compel arbitration. The trial court declined to order arbitration, but the Eighth District reversed and directed it to do so.
The Court’s Holding
The Supreme Court of Ohio affirmed. The disputes over when the agreements ended and how the evergreen provisions apply are disputes over contract interpretation and application, which fall within the agreements’ arbitration clauses.
The court rejected the juvenile court’s argument that its challenge to the agreements’ consideration and validity required a court to decide arbitrability first. Although a court must decide whether parties formed an arbitration agreement, the parties undisputedly entered arbitration clauses here. Their mutual promises to arbitrate supplied consideration for those clauses, which remain enforceable even while the juvenile court challenges the collective-bargaining agreements as a whole.
Key Takeaways
- A challenge to the validity of an entire contract does not defeat an arbitration clause when the clause itself was validly formed.
- Disputes over duration and evergreen provisions are arbitrable when the agreement broadly covers interpretation and application disputes.
- The case returns to the trial court to order the parties to arbitration.
Why It Matters
The decision reinforces Ohio’s strong policy favoring arbitration and applies the severability principle to public-sector collective-bargaining agreements. An employer cannot avoid an agreed arbitration process merely by contending that another provision of the overall agreement renders the contract void.
For unions and public employers, the ruling means that disputes over whether an agreement expired and whether an evergreen clause continued contractual obligations ordinarily belong before the arbitrator when the agreement assigns interpretive disputes to arbitration.