A large agricultural company has filed a lawsuit against California’s Agricultural Labor Relations Board challenging a law passed two years ago that gives farmworkers additional options to gain union representation and exercise collective bargaining rights.
The Wonderful Co., which markets Wonderful Pistachios and Fiji Water products, filed the lawsuit May 13 in Kern County Superior Court. In addition to allowing farmworkers to establish union representation through secret ballots, the new law allows the workers to unionize if a majority of them sign authorization cards or submit mail-in ballots.
In the lawsuit, the company argues that the card-check law illegally removes employers from the unionization process.
“Furthermore, the company argues that the new law lacks requirements for dating authorization cards and does not include an independent verification process to confirm that a majority of employees genuinely support unionization,” the Western Growers Family of Companies, an industry advocacy group, said in a blog post. “Consequently, the company is requesting an injunction to prevent the (labor relations) board from enforcing the certification with respect to Wonderful until a verdict is reached in the lawsuit.”
In March, the ALRB denied Wonderful Nurseries LLC an immediate stay on the certification of the United Farm Workers of America as a bargaining representative for nursery employees. The state Labor Code requires the immediate certification of a bargaining unit if a majority of employees support the move, the ALRB said in an administrative order.
Wonderful alleged that even though 327 employees submitted authorization cards out of a workforce of 640, 148 employees later submitted declarations requesting the revocation of their cards. These workers indicated they thought the cards were meant to access $600 in federal Covid relief funds and that they didn’t understand the cards were votes on unionization, according to the company.
“Wonderful’s allegations as described in its motion are serious in nature and, if supported by proper evidence, would constitute a cognizable objection to the UFW’s certification under (an objections process),” the ALRB said in its March 6 administrative order.
Victor Narro, project director and professor of labor studies at the UCLA Labor Center, said state lawmakers passed the law allowing authorization cards and mail-in ballots to counter employers who allegedly can control the workers’ lives through indoctrination, limit unions’ access to workers and arrange for their transportation to the fields. In turn, they may be able to manipulate the process of secret-ballot elections, Narro said.
“The process of a secret ballot is impossible because of the way workplaces are arranged,” Narro told the Southern California Record, adding that unions around the nation use the card system to obtain bargaining rights.
Critics, however, say the opposite, that the card-check system is too open to coercion by labor unions and can lead to fraudulent elections.
Union organizing is on the upswing nationwide, Narro said, indicating that employers may be attempting to litigate labor-organizing rights all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, where they could be declared unconstitutional.
“I think they’re trying to create a pathway to the U.S. Supreme Court,” he said.
In March, the UFW filed an unfair labor charge against Wonderful Nurseries with the ALRB, arguing that the company intimidated workers into taking part in an anti-union protest in Visalia, violating their labor rights.
Wonderful Nurseries subjected workers to “captive-audience meetings,” forced them to sign an anti-union petition, circulated anti-union fliers during work hours and spread disinformation about the UFW, according to a union news release.
Neither Wonderful Co. nor the UFW responded to the Record’s requests for comment.