This case involves the National Labor Relations Board's (NLRB or Board) petition for a preliminary injunction under Section 10(j) of the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA). The NLRB sought to compel Trinity Health Grand Haven Hospital (Trinity) to resume bargaining with a union after Trinity had withdrawn recognition of the union. The district court granted the injunction, ordering Trinity to recognize the union and resume negotiations. However, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals reversed this decision.

The dispute arose after Trinity Health acquired the Grand Haven hospital. The union representing the hospital employees had affiliated with a larger union, and Trinity initially recognized this affiliation and agreed to extend an existing collective bargaining agreement. Negotiations for a new agreement were ongoing. A Trinity employee, Jamie Quinn, initiated a decertification petition to remove the union. After gathering signatures, the union filed this petition with the Board, which determined there was sufficient support for a decertification election.

An agreement was reached for an election to be held in September 2023. However, the union filed a request to block the counting of ballots due to pending unfair labor practice charges against Trinity, a fact not immediately communicated to Trinity or Quinn. The ballots were impounded, and the results were not announced. The union later withdrew its blocking request, and the Board scheduled the announcement of the election results.

The day before the results were to be announced, Quinn presented Trinity's president with a "disaffection petition," claiming it demonstrated the union had lost majority support. This petition had numerous defects, including missing statements of purpose on several pages and a lack of dated signatures, with many signatures recycled from the earlier decertification petition. Trinity, after a cursory tally of the signatures, concluded it had "objective evidence" of the union's loss of majority support and announced it would cease collective bargaining.

The following day, the Board announced the decertification election results: 89 votes for the union and 66 against. Trinity's objections were overruled, and the union was certified. Despite this, Trinity refused to recognize the union, leading the union to file unfair labor practice charges. An Administrative Law Judge (ALJ) ruled in favor of the NLRB, finding Trinity's withdrawal of recognition lacked objective evidence and violated Sections 8(a)(1) and 8(a)(5) of the NLRA. Trinity appealed the ALJ's decision to the Board.

During the ALJ proceedings, the NLRB's Regional Director petitioned the district court for a Section 10(j) injunction. The district court, relying on the ALJ's findings, granted the injunction. The Sixth Circuit reviewed the district court's decision to grant the preliminary injunction under an abuse of discretion standard.

The court applied the four-factor test established by the Supreme Court in Winter v. National Res. Def. Council, Inc. for preliminary injunctions: (1) likelihood of success on the merits, (2) likelihood of irreparable harm, (3) balance of equities, and (4) public interest.

Regarding the likelihood of success on the merits, the court found that the NLRB's argument that a properly conducted election trumps any subsequent evidence of repudiation of union support was not likely to be adopted by the court. The court reasoned that the NLRA's text does not explicitly mandate that union representatives must be installed or removed solely through elections, nor does it state that election results always supersede other evidence of union support. While acknowledging the Supreme Court's decision in Brooks v. NLRB, which supported a one-year certification rule, the court distinguished that case as applying to the certification of a new union, not to decertification elections. Furthermore, the court noted that Brooks relied heavily on deference to the Board's discretion, which is no longer afforded by current jurisprudence under cases like Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo. The court also considered the factual merits, acknowledging the disaffection petition's defects, such as recycled signatures, missing purpose statements, and lack of dates, which undermined its credibility. However, the court ultimately agreed with the district court that the Director had made a sufficiently "clear showing" of likely success on the merits, considering the weaknesses of the disaffection petition and the deferential standard the Court of Appeals applies to the Board's factual findings.

The critical factor in the court's decision was the irreparable harm prong. The court emphasized that the NLRB must demonstrate "certain and immediate" harm, not speculative or theoretical harm. The court rejected the NLRB's argument, often seen in other circuits, that a refusal to bargain inherently causes irreparable harm that the Board's remedial powers cannot fix. The court held that, post-Starbucks Corp. v. McKinney, the Board must meet the same burden as any other litigant, requiring affirmative evidence of harm, not just inferences based on the nature of the alleged violation. The court found the evidence presented by the Director—union meeting attendance data and an affidavit from a union member—insufficient. The meeting attendance data was equivocal, and the affidavit provided only vague assertions of employee dissatisfaction and a few anecdotal examples, failing to demonstrate that union support would decline to a point where the union could not negotiate effectively. The court also noted that any potential loss of benefits could likely be rectified by the Board's equitable remedies, such as back pay. The court also cited the Director's delay in seeking the injunction as further evidence that the harm was not immediate and irreparable.

The court found that the balance of equities and public interest factors were largely neutral or subsumed by the merits arguments, and therefore did not weigh in favor of the injunction.

Because the Director failed to demonstrate a likelihood of irreparable harm, the Sixth Circuit reversed the district court's order and vacated the injunction.

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