Labor Relations: The Meet and Confer Process

Similarly, a policy prohibiting deputy sheriffs from collectively consulting legal counsel and/or labor representatives (“huddling”) following a deputy-involved shooting was found to be a fundamental managerial or policy decision outside of the MMBA’s meet and confer requirement because its primary purpose was to collect accurate information regarding deputy-involved shootings. 150 But in another case involving a city’s unilateral move to contract out its police department and law enforcement services to the county Sheriff, the Court of Appeal found a violation. The Court noted that contracting out these services not only significantly affected the wages, hours, and working conditions of the employees, but it also outweighed any management rights authority that the city had in making the decision unilaterally without meeting and conferring with the union. 151 In an example involving the Dills Act, which governs state employees, a unilateral decision to change the evaluation tool for physicians within the Department of Corrections, and to provide remedial training, was found to be a fundamental managerial decision outside the scope of representation, as the decision was made to bring health care in prisons to a constitutionally acceptable level. 152 Under the Dills Act, as under the MMBA, the scope of representation does not include consideration of the merits, necessity, or organization of any service or activity provided by law or executive order. 153 b. Emergency An agency’s governing body can declare an emergency, which suspends the duty to meet and confer regarding a particular rule, if the governing body provides notice and an opportunity to meet and confer at the earliest practical time following the adoption of an ordinance, rule or regulation. 154 In order to justify a declaration of emergency, a situation must create a “dislocation possessing a qualitative dimension that goes beyond irritation and inconvenience.” 155 A work stoppage may constitute such an emergency. For example, a concerted series of intermittent work stoppages by public employees, particularly employees at public health facilities, constituted an emergency exempting a county from meet and confer obligations otherwise imposed on public agency employers. 156 In Sonoma County Organization of Public/Private Employees v. County of Sonoma , the County was the target of a series of unannounced job actions constituting an absence of workers, directed at the County’s public health facilities, which were staffed by workers whose jobs required unique skills and training and whose absence clearly endangered the public health and safety. The County passed an emergency ordinance authorizing the immediate suspension of employees’ participation in the “rolling job action.” The Court of Appeal defined an emergency as follows:

[A]n emergency may well be evidenced by an imminent and substantial threat to public health or safety . . . Without question, an emergency must have “a substantial likelihood that serious

Labor Relations: The Meet and Confer Process ©2019 (s) Liebert Cassidy Whitmore 26