Bryan Little, Farm Employers Labor Service

March 30, 2023

On March 28, the Assembly Budget Subcommittee spent a rainy afternoon well into an evening featuring a brief respite from our recent rains considering “budget change proposals,” submitted by state agencies to the Governor’s 2023/2024 budget.  These “BCPs” generally involve requests to reprogram spending or increase spending to implement changes in the law passed by the Legislature in the prior legislative session.  On March 28, the committee considered a different sort of BCP.

You’re probably familiar the political soap opera that unfolded around the Governor’s initial refusals to sign the mail-in ballot card-check bill to ease unionization of agricultural workers (AB 2183, Stone) in which the Governor, the California Labor Federation, and the United Farm Workers agreed among themselves to amend AB 2183 once the Governor reversed course and signed it into law.  Among the agreed-upon changes were deletion of the facility for an agricultural employer to opt for “labor peace” status, where an employer agrees to in no way interfere with attempts to unionize the workforce, including allowing unfettered worksite access (which the U.S. Supreme Court found was a violation of a farmer’s constitutionally-protected property rights; believe it or not, you still have property rights, even in California!) in exchange for your employees having the dubious privilege of voting in a mail-in ballot election rife with opportunities for union organizer mischief. Unsurprisingly, not a single agricultural employer signed up to kiss that ugly step-sister before the January 31, 2023 deadline. 

As a result, Ag Labor Relations Act organizing will be governed by the remaining provisions of AB 2183, allowing union agents to pester farm employees into signing anything to get the organizers to leave them alone, to get help with an immigration problem, or get a $600 debit card courtesy of the federal government for COVID, drought and flood relief.  Up to a year later, that hapless worker may find UFW using that signature to unionize an employer with whom the employee has no grievance whatsoever because the employee might have not even known he or she would be working for that employer when he or she signed the union organizer’s document.

Assembly Budget Subcommittee 4 approved a BCP that will effectively make the agreement among the Governor, the Labor Federation,  and the UFW a rider to the 2023/2024 state budget.  No policy committee will ever consider this change to state law.  It’s certainly not the “legislative process” most of us learned about in our high school American Government class.

We now know the broad strokes of California ag labor relations law going forward: “majority support petitions” for unions to demonstrate putative “support” of a majority of an employer’s employees for union representation, vastly expanded penalty power under which the Ag Labor Relations Board can penalize employers up to $25,000 for unfair labor practices that previously warranted only remedial remedies, and a new appeal bond requirement requiring an employer to post a bond equivalent to the monetary value of an Ag Labor Relations Board’s make-whole order (back pay, reinstatement, or the value of a multi-year collective bargaining agreement imposed through mandatory “mediation” bestowed by the Legislature years ago) before being allowed to appeal to a court of law out of a quasi-judicial process at the ALRB dominated by former California Rural Legal attorneys and fellow-travelers. 

FELS can furnish you with resources and training for you and your supervisors on the ins-and-outs of card check, union-proofing your workplace, and avoiding common compliance problems than can encourage unionization.  You can reach us at 800-753-9073 or info@fels.net.