Court Orders California to Count Ballots in Union Decertification Vote

WFB: 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.

“The drastic remedy of throwing out the election in a case such as this one would appear to be either arbitrary or punitive (or both)—i.e., unnecessarily disenfranchising the employees as a punishment for the employer’s wrongdoing,” the ruling says.

The court said the board took an adversarial approach to management at Gerawan Farming, but its course of action came at the expense of its employees, rather than the company itself. Refusing to count the ballots amounted to an attack on employees’ rights, rather than company executives, according to the appeals court. The court said the agency is designed to safeguard farm workers, rather than organized labor.

“The Board so narrowly focused on punishing the employer that it effectively lost sight of the correlative statutory value of protecting the farmworkers’ right to choose, which was and is a fundamental part of the Board’s mission,” the ruling says. “We believe the Board’s one-sided approach constituted legal error.”  more here