Cite as: 532 U. S. 706 (2001)
Opinion of the Court
of this exclusion is made all the more startling by virtue of the Board's extension of it to judgment based on greater "experience" as well as formal training. See Reply Brief for Petitioner 3 ("professional or technical skill or experience"). What supervisory judgment worth exercising, one must wonder, does not rest on "professional or technical skill or experience"? If the Board applied this aspect of its test to every exercise of a supervisory function, it would virtually eliminate "supervisors" from the Act. Cf. NLRB v. Yeshiva Univ., 444 U. S. 672, 687 (1980) (Excluding "decisions . . . based on . . . professional expertise" would risk "the indiscriminate recharacterization as covered employees of professionals working in supervisory and managerial capacities").
As it happens, though, only one class of supervisors would be eliminated in practice, because the Board limits its categorical exclusion with a qualifier: Only professional judgment that is applied "in directing less-skilled employees to deliver services" is excluded from the statutory category of "independent judgment." Brief for Petitioner 11. This second rule is no less striking than the first, and is directly contrary to the text of the statute. Every supervisory function listed by the Act is accompanied by the statutory requirement that its exercise "requir[e] the use of independent judgment" before supervisory status will obtain, § 152(11), but the Board would apply its restriction upon "independent judgment" to just 1 of the 12 listed functions: "responsibly
not include the authority of an employee to direct another to perform discrete tasks stemming from the directing employee's experience, skills, training, or position"). It is those opinions that were cited in the Regional Director's opinion resolving the representation dispute, see App. to Pet. for Cert. 52a-53a, which was accepted without further review by the Board and was unreviewable in the unfair labor practice proceeding. "We do not, of course, substitute counsel's post hoc rationale for the reasoning supplied by the Board itself." NLRB v. Yeshiva Univ., 444 U. S. 672, 685, n. 22 (1980) (citing SEC v. Chenery Corp., 332 U. S. 194, 196 (1947)).
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