Arbitration award vacated due to "evident partiality" of the arbitrator

Bear with me as I catch up on decisions announced over the last week, as I was in trial.

The Twelfth District in City of Mason v. Mason Professional Firefighters IAFF Local 4049 has vacated an arbitration award in favor of the union due to the "evident partiality" of the arbitrator, based on the arbitrator's role as executive director of a union-advocacy group.

The lesson here, I suppose, is to vet your arbitrators well, lest you be stuck with an adverse award. The opinion here doesn't do much to explain why the City didn't do that, other than to say that the position in question wasn't listed on the arbitrator's CV. I've also done some Googling, and the results (including the arbitrator's web site at the University of Cincinnati) don't reveal an obvious connection between the arbitrator and the advocacy group in question.  Still--I'm surprised to see an arb award vacated. That's a tough row to hoe, and a significant majority of arbitration awards are confirmed without modification. If you're trying to challenge them in the courts, you're likely already too late.

The arbitration at issue here relates to the employment of one (and only one) Joe Rosell, who had been a firefighter and paramedic for Mason. He was fired in 2014. The union filed a grievance, and then an arbitration. An arbitrator was selected from a roster provided by the Federal Medication Conciliation Service, using an alternating-strike procedure.

A hearing was conducted and the arbitrator ruled in favor of the union. He then emailed his bill to the parties--and that's how the City discovered, from the signature block on his email, that the arbitrator was the "Executive Director of Unitarian Universalist Justice Ohio," which is an advocacy group that supports and is supported by organized labor.

The City moved to vacate the award on the basis of "evident partiality," as permitted by R.C. 2711.10.  (Ohio's Arbitration Act is similar in this respect to the Federal Arbitration Act in 9 USC 10(a)(2).)  A magistrate found that no partiality existed and the trial judge agreed, writing that the arbitrator's affiliation with a pro-union organization falls into the category of "mere imaginative appearance or suspicion of partiality," which was "insufficient to establish under R.C. 2711.10(B) that
there was 'evidence partiality' [sic] on the part of the arbitrator." The trial judge characterized the arbitrator's affiliation as a "peripheral matter[] unrelated to [the] arbitration."

But the Twelfth District reversed, finding that "the facts and circumstances in the present case depart from normal procedures of arbitration significantly enough to find evident partiality." In particular, the court leaned heavily on the fact that the arbitrator wasn't merely affiliated with or a supporter of the UUJO, but was its executive director, and therefore was charged with (and paid for) implementing its policies and procedures.

Again, given the nature of the arbitrator's affiliation, and the fact that it's undisclosed, it's not terribly surprising to see this one vacated--but vacation is nevertheless very much the exception, rather than the rule.