Can an employee terminable at will receive for-cause termination protection?

A termination dispute arising from a collective bargaining agreement (CBA) was not arbitrable because giving for-cause termination protection to an exempt-class employee via the CBA would violate a statute, decisional law, or public policy, a recent New York ruling said.

Exempt-class civil service employees are those who have positions of a confidential nature and personal qualities that an examination cannot practicably test. This class of employees is terminable at will. In 2012, the Town of Monroe appointed to its planning board a new secretary, whose role was deemed an exempt position.

In 2015, the town entered a CBA with Teamsters Local 445. The CBA defined the bargaining unit to include the secretary, vested certain exempt employees with for-cause termination protection, made the discipline and termination procedures in sections 75 and 76 of the Civil Service Law applicable to the secretary and to most other employees, and provided grievance procedures leading to binding arbitration.

In 2017, the town terminated the employee. This prompted the union to file a grievance alleging violations of the CBA’s just cause termination provision and of the requirements of section 75. When the town refused to address the grievance, the union filed a petition to compel arbitration.

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The town filed a motion to dismiss. The New York Supreme Court denied this motion and ruled in the union’s favor. Neither law nor public policy prohibited the parties from bargaining tenure protections for an exempt employee or prevented the employee from arbitrating the termination, the court said.

The Appellate Division agreed with the Supreme Court’s decision. Thus, the Supreme Court granted the petition to compel arbitration.

Dispute shouldn’t be arbitrated

In The Matter of Teamsters Local 445 v. Town of Monroe, the State of New York Court of Appeals held that the lower court should have denied the union’s petition to compel arbitration.

This dispute over the secretary’s termination was not arbitrable because the CBA was unenforceable to the extent that it granted for-cause termination protection to certain exempt employees, the court explained.

A CBA could not provide for-cause termination protections to exempt employees, the court decided. It supported this decision with the statutory framework, the criteria for exempting positions, and relevant policy concerns.

The court noted that the legislature intended to closely guard exempt positions. The legislature clearly excluded exempt employees from the removal and disciplinary protection scheme in sections 75 and 76 of the Civil Service Law, which provided that these employees had no expectation or right to such tenure protections, the court said.

“The statute designates only a handful of such positions, permits civil service commissions to classify positions as exempt only where examination is impractical, and requires a civil service commission to review each exempt position upon vacancy to determine ‘whether such position, as then constituted, is properly classified in the exempt class,’” wrote Judge Michael Garcia for the court.

Lastly, the court found that public policy also weighed against enforcing the CBA’s for-cause termination protections.