## Facts

- The Boeing Company operated a 787 Dreamliner production facility in North Charleston, South Carolina, with about 2,700 production-and-maintenance employees.
- The International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers petitioned to represent a unit limited to about 178 flight-line readiness technicians (FRTs) and flight-line readiness technician inspectors (FRTIs).
- The union won a May 2018 election in the petitioned-for FRT/FRTI unit after previously losing an election in a substantially larger production-and-maintenance unit.
- FRTs/FRTIs generally earned higher pay than many other production employees and held certain specialized licenses held by only a small portion of excluded employees.
- FRTs/FRTIs shared many terms and conditions of employment with other production-and-maintenance employees, including common systems for hiring, payroll, timekeeping, leave, benefits, and discipline.
- FRTs/FRTIs were part of an integrated production line; they were sometimes loaned to other parts of the line to address backlogs, while other employees were not temporarily assigned to perform FRT/FRTI work.

## Issues

1. Whether a bargaining unit limited to FRTs and FRTIs on an integrated production line constituted an “appropriate” unit under § 9(b) of the National Labor Relations Act.
2. How the “traditional” community-of-interest test should be applied to petitions seeking small, carve-out units within a larger, integrated workforce.

## Decision

- The Board (Chairman Ring and Members Kaplan and Emanuel) reversed the Regional Director and held the petitioned-for FRT/FRTI unit was not an appropriate bargaining unit.
- The Board clarified a three-step community-of-interest analysis for evaluating petitioned-for units.
- Applying the clarified framework, the Board found: (1) inadequate internal community of interest within the proposed unit, (2) no meaningfully distinct bargaining interests separating the proposed unit from excluded employees, and (3) no industry-specific unit guidelines supporting the proposed configuration.
- Member McFerran dissented and would have found the petitioned-for unit appropriate.

## Legal Principles

- Unit appropriateness under § 9(b) is assessed using a community-of-interest analysis that requires comparative evaluation of included and excluded employees’ interests.
- The Board applied a three-step framework:  
  - whether the petitioned-for employees share an internal community of interest;  
  - whether excluded employees have meaningfully distinct interests, in the collective-bargaining context, that outweigh similarities to included employees; and  
  - whether Board-established, industry-specific unit configuration guidelines support the proposed unit.
- A petitioned-for subset within an integrated operation may be deemed inappropriate where shared terms and conditions of employment and operational integration outweigh differences such as pay rates, credentials, or some distinct duties.

## Conclusion

The Board rejected the union’s proposed FRT/FRTI carve-out unit and clarified that the traditional community-of-interest test requires a comparative showing that the proposed unit is internally cohesive and meaningfully distinct from excluded employees, with attention to any applicable industry-specific unit guidance.


The Boeing Co., 368 N.L.R.B. No. 67 (2019)