Employees’ Prolonged Legal Battle with Union Ends

Years of protests and calls for the Agricultural Labor Relations Board (ALRB) to count ballots ended last week with a win for employees seeking a divorce from the labor union they say never represented them.

Ballots left uncounted and sealed for five years were opened and counted in front of witnesses after the California Supreme Court ordered the vote tally. The move came in a legal battle that pitted the United Farm Workers (UFW) against employees of Gerawan Farming.

The ballot count revealed that nearly 1,100 Gerawan Farming employees did not want union representation, while 197 did.

“If your vote truly is your voice, then today is proof that the voices of thousands of California farmworkers have been silenced for five years,” Assemblyman Jim Patterson said in a prepared statement.

Employees set out to decertify the union early in the relationship through a series of votes that were never counted. They charged that the union abandoned them in earlier contract negotiations that began after a 1990 vote by Gerawan employees to request union representation. Short-lived negotiations took place after the 1990 vote. Those talks ended when the union failed to return to the table.

In 2012, the UFW requested renewed contract negotiation with Gerawan, refusing requests to explain their lengthy absence from the negotiating table. This sparked the decertification vote and various legal battles related to their absence.

Western Growers Association President Tom Nassif characterized the last-ditch effort by the UFW and ALRB to drag out the decertification vote as an attempt “to shield the UFW from the humiliation of its irrelevance.”

Source: Western Farm Press