Why all farm workers need SB 1736

• SB 1736 is needed to help tens of thousands of farm workers get the rights and benefits they voted for in state-supervised secret-ballot elections: life-improving union contracts for themselves and their families.

• Of the 428 companies where farm workers voted for the UFW since 1975, only 185 have signed contracts with the Cesar Chavez-founded union. Many growers retaliated against their workers' choice at the ballot box by never agreeing to union contracts. Growers hired union-busting attorneys skilled at using endless delaying tactics. Such illegal conduct contributes to the grinding poverty farm workers continue to suffer.

• The solution to this bad-faith bargaining under California's farm labor law, the "make-whole remedy," doesn't work. Under make-whole, employers must make their workers "whole" for economic losses suffered from violations of the law such as failing to negotiate in good faith. But it takes years, sometimes decades, of investigation, prosecution and litigation before farm workers receive anything from the make whole remedy. Few workers have benefited. In the few cases where money was paid, it was probably less than what growers spent on attorney fees in litigating through the administrative and court systems.

• "Delay remains inevitable" under the current law, Agricultural Labor Relations Board Chairwoman Genevieve A. Shiroma wrote this year. By the time "make-whole orders become final, they may be unenforceable, either because the [grower] has gone out of business or [is] unable to pay [or because] many of the [farm workers] to whom make-whole is owed have vanished." Farm labor is still a highly seasonal and transient occupation.
  
  
• Only the binding arbitration in SB 1736 will aid the thousands of farm workers who have waited for years while talks for union contracts have dragged on without hope of progress.
  United Farm Workers of America, AFL-CIO
  June 2002
  

Examples:

• D'Arrigo Brothers is one of California's largest vegetable producers employing about 1,400 workers, mostly in the Salinas Valley. D'Arrigo workers voted for the UFW in an ALRB-conducted secret-ballot election on Sept. 9, 1975. Years of meetings at the negotiating table have failed to produce a contract. In major concessions prior to a Feb. 2, 2000 session, the UFW agreed to D'Arrigo's proposed language in anticipation of concluding a total contract. But the new proposal from D'Arrigo moved the parties even further apart. With its drastically diminished resources, the ALRB is still investigating bad-faith bargaining charges filed by the UFW, which are extremely complex and take months and years to investigate and litigate, respectively. Meanwhile, D'Arrigo worker representatives do not want to lose work time attending pointless negotiations. D'Arrigo is a prime candidate for the process under SB 1736.

• Pictsweet Mushroom Farm workers in Ventura voted overwhelmingly for the UFW in 1975, and a contract was negotiated. When the ranch was purchased in 1987, the new owner, the anti-union Tennessee-based agribusiness corporation United Foods Inc., refused to honor or re-negotiate the agreement. The latest bid by workers to renew the contract began in 1999. Since then, Pictsweet has been accused by the state of violating a host of labor laws. A detailed nine-count indictment was issued on June 26, 2001 by ALRB prosecutors, covering bad-faith bargaining and illegally acting to attempt to get rid of the UFW. On Jan. 10, 2002, a state administrative judge ruled Pictsweet illegally fired a mushroom picker in retaliation for his support of the union. Pictsweet has refused to agree to even the most basic union contract provisions.