## Facts

- A union and Reichold Chemicals, Inc. were parties to a collective-bargaining agreement (CBA) that included separate provisions governing vacation benefits and seniority.
- During negotiations for a new agreement, bargaining broke down and bargaining-unit employees went on strike for approximately three months.
- After the strike ended and employees returned to work, Reichold issued a bulletin reducing employees’ vacation hours by about one-fourth for that year, proportionate to the time spent on strike.
- The union filed a grievance challenging the reduction and contended that employees should receive full annual vacation credit despite the strike.
- The CBA’s vacation provision based vacation accrual on “length of service” and expressly provided that employees did not accrue vacation during periods of layoff.
- The CBA’s seniority provision also measured seniority by “length of service,” and stated that accumulation of service for seniority purposes could be broken only by specified events; a strike was not listed among those events.
- In earlier negotiations between the same parties, the agreement had expressly granted vacation credit for strike time; the CBA at issue did not contain that express strike-credit language.
- The parties submitted the dispute to arbitration under the CBA’s grievance-arbitration procedure.

## Issues

1. Did the CBA permit Reichold to prorate annual vacation hours to exclude the period employees spent on strike?
2. Did the seniority clause’s treatment of “length of service” (and its limited list of breaks in service that did not include strikes) require that strike time be treated as creditable service for vacation accrual?
3. What weight, if any, should be given to the parties’ prior bargaining history in which they had expressly provided vacation credit for strike time, when that language was absent from the current CBA?

## Decision

- The arbitrator denied the grievance.
- The arbitrator upheld Reichold’s reduction of annual vacation hours in proportion to the strike period.
- The arbitrator rejected the union’s argument that the seniority clause’s definition of uninterrupted service controlled vacation accrual under the separate vacation provision.

## Legal Principles

- Contract terms that use similar phrases (such as “length of service”) may carry different meaning and consequences in different CBA articles when the clauses serve different functions and contain different qualifiers.
- A benefit provision that ties accrual to service and expressly withholds accrual during certain nonworking periods (such as layoffs) supports reading vacation as earned based on time worked unless the agreement clearly provides otherwise.
- A seniority clause that protects continuity of seniority status during certain events does not, by itself, guarantee accrual of wage-related benefits during those same events.
- Bargaining history may be used as interpretive evidence, including the significance of omitted language: when parties previously negotiated an explicit benefit (such as strike-time vacation credit) and later do not include it, that omission can indicate the benefit was not agreed to in the later contract.
- Where the CBA does not clearly grant full vacation accrual during a strike, an employer may prorate vacation to reflect time not worked, so long as the action is consistent with the agreement’s overall text and structure.

## Conclusion

Reichold Chemicals, Inc., 66 Lab. Arb. Rep. 745 (1976) held that the employer did not violate the CBA by reducing employees’ annual vacation hours by roughly one-fourth to reflect a three-month strike, because the vacation and seniority provisions served different purposes, the vacation clause did not clearly grant strike-time accrual, and the parties’ earlier express strike-credit language was not included in the controlling agreement.
