Continuing violations grievances are another exception to the idea that untimely grievances will not be arbitrated. In a continuing violation grievance, the union alleges that the violation of the collective bargaining agreement recurs, maybe on a daily or weekly basis. Every day is a new violation and therefore a grievance is not untimely even it’s filed outside the time limits of the first violation. The remedy may be restricted to the time frame of the grievance. For example, a group of workers believed that they should have been paid on-call pay rather than standby pay when one of them reads the contract and decides that having to wait at the workplace, as they have done for years, sounds more than like on-call than standby as those terms are defined by the contract. The employer says, “Nope, your grievance is untimely, there’s a past practice, etc., etc.” The arbitrator will probably disagree with that employer, and find that the allegation is timely, but will likely limit the recovery to thirty days (or some other contractual limit) prior to filing the grievance, if she finds that a violation has occurred.
If you’ve liked this series, please bookmark my blog and visit again soon. If you would to read the whole series on Procedural Arbitrability, it starts HERE. In my next few posts, I’ll be discussing Substantive Arbitrability.