Two wardens, two very different calls – and an email folder that ended up in front of an arbitrator
A California appeals court has reinstated an arbitration win for a union steward, ruling internal manager emails proved anti-union animus behind her 60-workday suspension.
On May 15, the Third Appellate District reversed a lower court and ordered full confirmation of an arbitration award in favor of Tracylyn Lopez, a correctional officer and union steward at Salinas Valley State Prison. The decision is a useful case study for HR teams in unionized workplaces, particularly on how parallel discipline tracks can pull in different directions and on the danger of a manager's email folder.
The facts run back to 2017. Lopez, a job steward for the California Correctional Peace Officers Association, was disciplined for using profanity about two co-workers and putting them on what she described as a hostile list. The matter ended with a letter of reprimand. In July 2018, she posted excerpts of those disciplinary materials on a union bulletin board near the prison's main entrance, redacting her own first name but leaving the other officers' surnames visible and highlighted.
The warden at the time asked her to remove the posting. She did, and he closed the matter without further discipline. He retired shortly afterward. His successor, Warden Tammy Foss, took a different view. She pushed for direct action without investigation, and Lopez received a 60-workday suspension in 2019.
From there, two tracks ran in parallel. Lopez appealed to the State Personnel Board, the constitutional body that reviews state civil-service discipline. She also filed a grievance under the union's memorandum of understanding, alleging retaliation for protected activity, and CCPOA pursued the matter into arbitration on her behalf. The grievance was rooted in the Ralph C. Dills Act, California's public-sector collective bargaining law. The SPB sided with the employer in October 2020, finding the posting fostered a code of silence, which the decision describes as the unwritten rule against reporting on fellow officers. The arbitrator, ruling in June 2022, went the other way, finding the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation had violated the MOU by interfering with protected speech and union representation.
The arbitrator leaned heavily on internal emails. According to the decision, Foss wrote in one message that Lopez was a union rep whose influence had harmed her own people, and in another said Lopez was part of the bad culture of the institution and signaled a pending 60-day suspension.
The arbitrator characterized the emails as evidence that Foss harbored animus toward a powerful union representative who had criticized and successfully challenged disciplinary actions.
She also flagged the speed of the decision. The previous warden chose not to discipline Lopez at all. Foss leapt to the maximum penalty without interviewing or investigating her. That gap, the arbitrator wrote, weighed heavily against the claim the same suspension would have been imposed regardless of the union activity.
The trial court tried to split the difference. It accepted that the SPB and the arbitrator could reach different conclusions but ruled the arbitrator could not effectively undo discipline the SPB had upheld. It struck the rescission and backpay portion of the award.
The Court of Appeal was not persuaded. Judicial review of labor arbitration is extremely narrow, the panel wrote, and the public policy exception requires that the award itself, not the underlying conduct, conflict with a clear policy. The SPB had reviewed the suspension for cause under the Civil Service Act. The arbitrator had reviewed it for retaliation under the Dills Act. Those are different questions, the court said, and overlapping adjudications are not uncommon in California's system of administrative law. The award offset the suspension rather than bypassing the SPB. The code-of-silence argument got the same treatment: even if the policy exists, it does not compel any specific penalty.
The judgment was reversed and remanded with instructions to confirm the arbitrator's award in full, without correction. CCPOA recovers its costs on appeal.
For HR professionals, the practical takeaways are concrete. Manager emails framing a union representative's influence in disciplinary terms became the central evidence of anti-union animus. A new manager jumping to the maximum penalty without an interview or investigation undercut the employer's defense that the same outcome would have followed anyway. And running parallel discipline and grievance tracks means an employer can prevail on one and lose the other, with the union-side outcome capable of effectively neutralizing the agency-side one.
