A new California law streamlining the unionization process for farmworkers is likely unconstitutional and defective, depriving agricultural employers of property and due process rights, a Kern County Superior Court judge concluded last month.
Judge Bernard Barmann Jr. handed down the opinion on July 18 in a case that pits Wonderful Nurseries LLC against the state Agricultural Labor Relations Board (ALRB) and the United Farm Workers union. Barmann sided with Wonderful over legal issues the company raised about the new law’s condensed unionization process and granted Wonderful a preliminary injunction to stop the union and ALRB from enforcing a UFW petition to bargain for the company’s workers.
The new law, Assembly Bill 2183, provides a tight timeline for unions to win workers’ collective bargaining rights through what’s called a card check authorization process. Wonderful has argued that this process fails to provide employers with needed safeguards to avoid having a union imposed on a nonconsenting majority of farmworkers.
Many of the Wonderful Nurseries’ workers felt they were misled into signing the UFW cards and never intended to authorize the union to represent them, according to the company’s legal filings. The UFW won the right to represent the Wonderful workers by what appeared to be a 51% margin, the company reported.
Wonderful characterized the voting process as secretive and one-sided and said it forces the company to enter into forced mediation on collective bargaining issues before it is allowed to present objections about the process, including questions about whether the cards collected were authentic and the lack of secret ballots. The process also forecloses judicial review until late in the ALRB approval process, according to the company.
“We are gratified by the court’s decision to stop the certification process until the constitutionality of the card check law can be fully and properly considered,” Wonderful said in a statement emailed to the Southern California Record. “The court has determined the card check law is likely unconstitutional, and it recognized that, absent an immediate injunction, Wonderful would suffer largely irreparable harm if forced to comply with the certification.”
The UFW’s president, Teresa Romero, called the court decision a setback for workers at Wonderful Nurseries.
“This is a shocking ruling, and at this time the ALRB can no longer enforce the union certification or continue hearings on this matter,” Romero said in a prepared statement. “We will be appealing this decision, but that takes time.”
Barmann’s ruling run counter to 89 years of labor law precedent requiring the employer to continue with the election objections process before turning to the courts, Romero said. Claims that workers were misled into supporting the UFW are untrue and were debunked by the ALRB’s general counsel after an investigation, according to Romero.
But the company characterized the judge’s ruling as a win for farmworkers who merit the right to “a secret ballot, a fair election and a process free of fraud.” Enforcing a process that lacks constitutional safeguards is not in the public interest, according to the company.
“... Farmworkers had been wrongly barred from objecting to a union being forced on them, and this ruling states that Wonderful indeed has the standing to fight to ensure those constitutional rights of farmworkers, including their due process and First Amendment rights, are not violated,” the Wonderful statement says.
Barmann’s decision indicated that the UFW and defendants offered little to rebut Wonderful’s complaints about the certification procedures and the company’s inability to challenge the vote until late in the process.
“... Their primary argument seems to be that even if there are risks of an erroneous certification or inadequate safeguards to prevent fraud or other irregularities in the collection of authorization cards, Wonderful has to wait until later to seek relief in the court of appeal because that is an adequate remedy and therefore not a deprivation of due process,” Judge Barmann wrote in his decision.