Court Orders Calif. to Count Ballots in Union Decertification Vote

This took forever.

(From The Washington Free Beacon)

After five years California farm workers will finally see their votes to kick out their union counted after a state court unanimously ruled that a state agency had interfered with the election.

A three-judge panel from the California Fifth District Court of Appeals ruled that the state Agricultural Labor Relations Board improperly blocked a 2013 election to decertify the United Farm Workers from representing workers at Gerawan Farming, Inc. The ruling called the labor board’s treatment of the workers as “either arbitrary or punitive (or both).” The Court found that the campaign to cut ties with the union was an organic “worker-initiated and worker led movement,” rather than an employer-sponsored one.

In 2014 we wrote;

California, what are you doing to yourself? You were so beautiful. You were once full of so much life. So full of promise and opportunity. But now look at you. The Golden State isn’t very golden anymore. You are sinking into the big government (socialist?) morass more and more every year. You are run by the prison workers, teacher’s, and (apparently) the farm worker’s unions. It’s just a shame.

What’s particularly deplorable is that the state is helping the United Farm Workers in its effort to shake down the very farm workers it says it represents. The union took off 20 years ago and has returned to the farm in question looking for revenue. The long lost union is demanding that everyone at this particular peach farm pay the UFW 3% of their pay. Though we don’t know for sure the workers likely voted against forking over their pay.

But the state regulator won’t say.

(From CNBC.com)

A group of California farm workers for the nation’s largest peach operation voted on whether to kick out or accept representation by the United Farm Workers. That was last November.

They still don’t know the results of the vote.

The state’s Agriculture Labor Relations Board (ALRB) won’t reveal the vote pending the outcome of an investigation into the voting. The investigation has been going on for months, and no one knows when it will be completed. In the meantime, the ALRB appointed a mediator who wrote up a three-year contract that, under California law, can unilaterally be imposed on the farmer, Dan Gerawan. He’s gone to court to stop that. “The contract was written by the government itself,” Gerawan said. “Not even the employees have a say in what goes in that contract.”

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http://www.againstcronycapitalism.org/