Background
Teamsters Local Union 839 represents employees in the Benton County Sheriff’s Office. In February 2023, the County suspended a sheriff’s office clerical employee for 24 hours without pay; three months later, the employee was terminated. Teamsters filed two grievances on behalf of the employee challenging both the suspension and termination, alleging violations of CBA sections 9.5 (requiring fair and uniform application of work rules) and 25.5 (requiring discipline for just cause).
The County denied both grievances, citing CBA Section 21.2, which defines a “grievance” as a dispute involving the CBA “except for actions of a disciplinary nature” and specifies that disciplinary issues must be reviewed through the Benton County Civil Service Commission. When Teamsters attempted to advance the disputes to arbitration, the County refused to participate. Teamsters then filed suit seeking to compel arbitration.
The trial court granted Teamsters’ motion to compel arbitration, deciding to let the arbitrator determine whether the disputes were arbitrable rather than making that determination itself. The County appealed.
The Court’s Holding
The Washington Court of Appeals reversed, holding that Teamsters’ disputes involve disciplinary actions that are expressly excluded from arbitration under the CBA and therefore are not subject to the grievance and arbitration procedures outlined in Article 21. The court emphasized that Section 21.2 explicitly carves out “actions of a disciplinary nature” from the definition of grievable disputes, which must instead be reviewed under Article 25 through the Civil Service Commission.
Although Teamsters argued it was challenging the discipline under Section 9.5’s protections for fair and uniform work rule application, the court rejected this framing, finding that the underlying dispute was fundamentally about disciplinary action. The court distinguished this case from Yakima County Law Enforcement Officers Guild, where conflicting CBA provisions created genuine ambiguity. Here, the CBA contained no such ambiguity—disciplinary actions were explicitly excluded from arbitration.
The court held that as a matter of law, courts have a duty to determine whether parties have agreed to arbitrate a dispute before compelling arbitration, and cannot delegate this threshold question to an arbitrator. The trial court erred by doing so and by granting summary judgment in Teamsters’ favor.
Key Takeaways
- Explicit contractual carve-outs excluding disciplinary actions from arbitration will be enforced even though federal law ordinarily favors arbitration of labor disputes.
- Trial courts must determine arbitrability as a threshold matter and cannot defer this legal question to arbitrators; doing so constitutes reversible error.
- When a CBA clearly excludes disciplinary actions from grievance procedures and establishes a separate review mechanism through a civil service commission, courts will enforce that structure regardless of other contract language pointing toward arbitration.
Why It Matters
This decision reinforces the enforceability of negotiated limits on arbitration in collective bargaining agreements. While federal labor law strongly favors arbitration, explicit contractual exclusions for specific categories of disputes—particularly disciplinary actions—will be upheld. For public employers like counties operating through civil service commissions, this establishes that parallel administrative review processes can successfully supersede arbitration clauses when the CBA language is sufficiently clear.
For unions, the decision illustrates that the presumption favoring arbitration has limits: ambiguity must actually exist in the contract language for the presumption to apply. Here, the court found only one reasonable interpretation of the CBA’s explicit exclusion of disciplinary actions from arbitration, leaving no room for the union’s alternative reading. The decision emphasizes that careful contract drafting by employers—explicitly carving out categories of disputes—can effectively shield certain management decisions from arbitration.
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