A three-second video, a union arbitrator, and a public-policy argument that fell flat on appeal
A federal appeals court has told a Chicago hotel it cannot fire a worker over a pocket knife when its own arbitrator said suspension was enough.
The Seventh Circuit's June 5, 2026 decision affirmed an arbitration award reinstating an employee terminated by the company, which does business as Chicago Hotel Collection. The ruling is a clean example of how federal courts treat public-policy challenges to arbitration awards when the underlying dispute is a workplace discipline case under a union contract.
The events were short. According to the opinion, closed-circuit video showed the worker take the knife out of his pocket at 38 seconds, smile at a co-worker at 41 seconds, and put it away at 43 seconds. The co-worker felt threatened. Hotel management had known the worker carried the knife and pulled it out from time to time, but he had never used it to injure or confront another worker. Police came and took the knife because its three-and-a-half-inch blade exceeded Chicago's two-and-a-half-inch limit for pocket knives. The worker was not charged or even issued a ticket.
The hotel fired him. Unite Here Local 1 grieved. The parties' collective bargaining agreement called for random selection of an arbitrator from a list of nine names. A union representative entered the nine names into random.org. It picked Peter Meyers. The hotel objected on the ground that Meyers was already...
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