IN THE UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS FOR THE FIFTH CIRCUIT _______________ m 99-30523 Summary Calendar _______________ ERNEST J. ARBOUR; TED PACE; JOSEPH GUERIN; JASON GUIDRY; HARVEY MICHAEL SMITH; and MICHAEL GONZALEZ, Plaintiffs-Appellants, VERSUS LAROUCHE INDUSTRIES, INC.; C.E. BATON ROUGE, INC., and FEDERATED ALUMINUM COUNCIL, INC., Defendants-Appellees. _________________________ Appeal from the United States District Court for the Middle District of Louisiana (97-CV-1134) _________________________ November 26, 1999 Before SMITH, BARKSDALE, and between LaRoche and the union required BENAVIDES, Circuit Judges. LaRoche to maintain their employment until the operating agreement ended and that their PER CURIAM:* subsequent employer, C.E. Baton Rouge, Inc. (“C-E”), violated the collective-bargaining In this “hybrid action” brought pursuant to agreement by (1) failing to negotiate in good section 301 of the National Labor Relations faith, insofar as it did not warn the transferring Act, union members challenge the termination members at the time of transfer that they of their employment that resulted from a contemplated closing the plant; and (2) failing transfer and subsequent plant closing. They to inform plaintiffs of its intention to close the charge their union with breach of the duty of plant sixty days before the intention arose, fair representation. The district court granted rather than sixty days before the plant closing the defendants’ motion for summary judgment would occur. Finally, plaintiffs assert that by and explained its reasons in a comprehensive ignoring these contract violations, the union and persuasive eighteen-page opinion entered violated the duty of fair representation. on April 19, 1999. We affirm, essentially for the reasons given by the district court. The district court dismissed the claim Plaintiffs claim the transfer agreement against LaRoche on the ground that the transfer agreement did not, on its face, provide a certain term of employment with LaRoche, * Pursuant to 5TH CIR. R. 47.5, the court has but rather simply made arrangements for the determined that this opinion should not be published employees (the agreement requiring, in whole, and is not precedent except under the limited merely that the employees should, upon circumstances set forth in 5TH CIR. R. 47.5.4. termination, be provided for under the various employers, it found that the union had not company-benefit “summary plans”) should failed fairly to represent the plaintiffs by failing they be terminated at the end of the operating to complain of these non-violations. agreement and then become “available” for employment by C-E. Because the transfer AFFIRMED. occurred more speedily than the operating agreement had anticipated, this eventuality did not arise; the transfer agreement was not triggered, and the plaintiffs found themselves transferred directly from the LaRoche collective-bargaining structure to the C-E structure. The district court thus provided the most straightforward reading of the agreement. The court also dismissed the claims against C-E, noting, correctly, that C-E’s collective- bargaining agreement included no “good-faith bargaining” requirement, so that even if (1) C-E had developed an intention to close the plant when it accepted the transferred members, and (2) such acceptance without warning violated a duty of good faith, C-E had no contractual obligation to act in good faith. Thus, any failure of good-faith bargaining worked a violation of the statute, not the contract, and must therefore have been complained of to the National Labor Relations Board, not the district court. The district court’s analysis is correct here, as well. The court could have bolstered its opinion by noting also that the plaintiffs provided no evidence that C-E actually anticipated closing the plant at the time of the employee transfer, so there is no evidence of a breach of good faith by which to escape summary judgment. The plaintiffs’ second claim against C-E is also devoid of merit. Their suggested reading of the contract would require C-E to give warning of an intention to close a plant sixty days before developing its first intention so to act. Such a metaphysical impossibility was probably not in the contemplation of the parties. Finally, the district court dismissed the charges against the union, because, having found no contractual violations by the 2