On February 26, 2016, the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit held in Dist. No. 1, Pac. Coast Dist., Marine Engineers' Beneficial Ass'n, AFL-CIO v. Liberty Mar. Corp. that under the parties' agreement, the issue of contract duration should be decided by an arbitrator (815 F.3d 834 (D.C. Cir. 2016)).

The plaintiff, a union, and the defendant, a shipping company, entered into a series of collective bargaining agreements (CBAs) over two decades. The most recent CBA was set to expire in June 2010. Negotiations over a successor CBA stalled, and the parties' signed a memorandum of understanding extending the existing CBA to September 30, 2011. Under the memorandum of understanding, the parties were required to follow certain grievance and arbitration procedures to resolve their disputes. If an impasse was reached in negotiating a successor agreement, the memorandum of understanding would terminate on the expiration date of September 30, 2011. For the duration of the memorandum of understanding, the defendant was required to employ only engineers represented by the plaintiff union as supervisory personnel aboard certain vessels.

The defendant informed the plaintiff that it lacked confidence in the negotiations and took steps to replace the employees represented by the plaintiff's union on October 1, 2011. On September 30, the plaintiff submitted formal grievances following the procedure set out in the memorandum of understanding. The defendant refused to arbitrate the disputes. Therefore, the plaintiff filed this action to compel the defendant to arbitrate. The district court held that it had jurisdiction to hear the suit and that, based on the parties' agreement, the question of whether an impasse had been reached should be arbitrated. The defendant appealed, arguing that:

The DC Circuit noted that while the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) has exclusive jurisdiction over most labor relations matters, the Labor Management Relations Act of 1947 gives federal courts jurisdiction over disputes regarding "violations of contracts" between an employer and a labor organization (29 U.S.C. § 185(a)). If a claim is both contractual and related to an unfair labor practice, federal courts may retain jurisdiction. They are likely to consider whether:

Here, the plaintiff's claim involved plainly contractual matters, including what would constitute an "impasse" under the terms of the agreement and whether the defendant's conduct breached the agreement. Moreover, the claim was not currently pending before the NLRB, and there was no initial representation question at issue. Therefore, the district properly exercised jurisdiction.

The DC Circuit further held that the issue of whether the parties had reached an impasse in their negotiations when the contract expired was arbitrable. The court explained that disputes relating to duration are arbitrable when the arbitration provision at issue is broad, unless the contract clearly provides or the parties agreed that the contract would expire before the dispute arose. In this case, the arbitration clause was very broad and required arbitration of "all disputes relating to the interpretation…of [the] Agreement." The duration clause of the contract did not provide a clear and fixed expiration date because the date could be extended if a party gave notice of intent to amend the agreement. Therefore, the issue of whether an impasse had been reached and the contract expired was arbitrable under the terms of the agreement.