368
Opinion of the Court
view, the answer is no. The Board's finding to the contrary rests on a refusal to credit probative circumstantial evidence, and on evidentiary demands that go beyond the substantive standard the Board purports to apply.
The Board adopted the ALJ's finding that 6 of Allentown's 32 employees had made "statements which could be used as objective considerations supporting a good-faith reasonable doubt as to continued majority status by the Union." 316 N. L. R. B., at 1207. (These included, for example, the statement of Rusty Hoffman that "he did not want to work in a union shop," and "would try to find another job if he had to work with the Union." Id., at 1206.) The Board seemingly also accepted (though this is not essential to our analysis) the ALJ's willingness to assume that the statement of a seventh employee (to the effect that he "did not feel comfortable with the Union and thought it was a waste of $35 a month," ibid.) supported good-faith reasonable doubt of his support for the union—as in our view it unquestionably does. And it presumably accepted the ALJ's assessment that "7 of 32, or roughly 20 percent of the involved employees" was not alone sufficient to create "an objective reasonable doubt of union majority support," id., at 1207. The Board did not specify
good reason that the meaning of the word has nothing to do with the force, as opposed to the source, of the considerations supporting the employer's doubt. See Webster's New International Dictionary 1679 (2d ed. 1949) (def. 2: "Emphasizing or expressing the nature of reality as it is apart from self-consciousness"). Requiring the employer's doubt to be based on "objective" considerations reinforces the requirement that the doubt be "reasonable," imposing on the employer the burden of showing that it was supported by evidence external to the employer's own (subjective) impressions. Justice Breyer asserts, instead, that the word "objective" has been redefined through a series of Board decisions ignoring its real meaning, so that it now means something like "exceedingly reliable." As we shall discuss in Part IV, the Board is entitled to create higher standards of evidentiary proof by rule, or even by explicit announcement in adjudication (assuming adequate warning); but when the Board simply repeatedly finds evidence not "objective" that is so, its decisions have no permanent deleterious effect upon the English language.
Page: Index Previous 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 NextLast modified: October 4, 2007