Because plaintiff’s allegations of broad anti-union bias are unsubstantiated by well-pleaded facts, they cannot give rise to the inference that defendants are negotiating in bad faith. See Chicago & N. W. Ry. Co., 402 U.S. at 575 (stating that an employer’s duty to bargain in good faith is essentially a corollary of its duty to recognize a union).
Plaintiff’s other allegations—including that defendants have not significantly altered their proposals from the Kirby proposal—similarly fall short of stating a claim for bad faith bargaining. Plaintiff misconceives the scope of the duty “to exert every reasonable effort” to reach an agreement, which does not require one side to accede to the other’s proposals:
[M]ovement toward the position of the other side is not a requirement of good
faith bargaining. . . . Mere insistence on demands that seem extremely harsh to the
other side and that a neutral party may consider “hard” is not a violation of
bargaining duties. An employer may insist on positions consistent with . . . its
asserted needs, even if the union may consider the proposals greedy.
Trans World Airlines, Inc., 682 F. Supp. at 1026 (internal citations omitted). “Courts must resist finding violations of the RLA based solely on evidence of hard bargaining, inability to reach agreement, or intransigent positions.” Horizon, 976 F.2d at 545. Here, plaintiff essentially asks the court to find bad faith predicated on US Airways’ lack of flexibility and its unwillingness to become more generous as the bargaining process progresses. But a company’s bargaining positions do not violate the statutory standards merely because they are “obstinate and unyielding,” Trans Int’l Airlines, Inc. v. Int’l Bhd. of Teamsters, 650 F.2d 949, 958 (9th Cir. 1980) (internal quotation marks omitted), and the distance between the parties after a long period of negotiations does not amount to a lack of reasonable effort to reach an agreement, Spirit, 2009 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 52326, at *30.
Nor could the facts alleged by plaintiff otherwise permit a conclusion that defendants are engaged in the mere pretense of negotiation. Extreme bargaining positions, such as a proposal by a carrier that would allow it to change unilaterally any work rule at any time for any reason or that would require the union to recruit replacement workers during a strike, have been found to constitute evidence of such surface bargaining. See Horizon, 976 F.2d at 547. Here, by contrast, USAPA argues that defendants’ proposal is unreasonable because it does not conform to industry standards as USAPA defines them. In order to assess this contention, the court would be forced to assess the substantive proposals of each party and to weigh their reasonableness. Doing so would take the court beyond the permissible scope of a bad faith bargaining inquiry.
