It told workers the deal was done and refused to process grievances
A county court declared its union deals dead and stopped processing grievances. Ohio’s highest court sent it back to arbitration.
The Supreme Court of Ohio ruled on October 27 that the Cuyahoga County Juvenile Court must arbitrate its disputes with Laborers’ International Union of North America, Local 860, over two collective-bargaining agreements the court had tried to walk away from.
The agreements, covering detention center staff and other juvenile court employees, both expired on December 31, 2019. But each contained an evergreen clause - a provision keeping the contract’s terms alive until one of three things happened: a successor agreement was negotiated, the union disclaimed interest, or employees voted to decertify the union.
None of those things happened. Negotiations stalled. Instead of honoring the existing terms, the juvenile court filed two lawsuits arguing the agreements had either expired outright or were never valid to begin with.
It went further. The court told union members no agreement existed anymore. When the union emailed a grievance, the court administrator responded that the court was “no longer processing grievances.”
Local 860 fought back, suing for breach of contract and pushing to force the dispute into arbitration. The employer, the union argued, had walked away without meeting any of the conditions that would have ended the agreements.
The trial court found the agreements valid but ruled they could not extend beyond December 31, 2020, under Ohio public-sector labor law. It also rejected the union’s emailed grievance. The Eighth District Court of Appeals reversed and sent the case back with orders to compel arbitration.
The Supreme Court agreed, unanimously. The key question: could the arbitration clause still be enforced when the employer was challenging the whole contract? Yes. An arbitration clause is treated as its own separate agreement, even inside a larger contract. Attacking the bigger deal does not take down the arbitration clause with it.
Both sides had agreed to arbitrate disputes over how the agreements should be read and applied. Their fight over when the agreements ended was exactly that kind of dispute.
The court noted narrow exceptions - where a party never actually signed a contract or was not legally able to enter it. But here, both sides clearly intended to make these deals and both signed them.
For HR teams managing unionized workforces: once you sign a collective-bargaining agreement with an arbitration clause, you cannot later dodge arbitration by arguing the contract itself was flawed. The clause survives, and the dispute goes to an arbitrator.
