HollyFrontier Defeats Union Effort to Include Salaried Chemists

HollyFrontier convinced a federal appeals court to rule Tuesday that an arbitrator exceeded his power by deciding salaried workers at the company’s Wyoming refinery must be part of the facility’s worker bargaining unit.

A lower court properly vacated the arbitrator’s decision because he wasn’t asked to decide that issue, a divided US Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit said.

The decision stems from a contract dispute between HollyFrontier Cheyenne Refining LLC and a labor union—a United Steelworkers local—representing workers at the Wyoming refinery.

An arbitrator found that HollyFrontier’s reassignment of work from hourly lab technicians to salaried chemists ...