Protest, new allegations mark start of hearing on UFW-Wonderful conflict
A protest on Truxtun Avenue accompanied the first day of a hearing Tuesday on a dispute between the United Farm Workers labor union and a local subsidiary of Los Angeles-based ag giant The Wonderful Co.
As several dozen Wonderful Nurseries LLC employees chanted and held signs outside the Bakersfield Marriott at the Convention Center, the California Agricultural Labor Relations Board convened private-session talks between the two parties in the dispute. No decision was announced; the hearing, which will include public sessions, could last for days or weeks.
The start of the hearing came one day after the ALRB’s general counsel, Julia Montgomery, filed a complaint against Wonderful accusing the company of violating its workers’ rights.
Her filing was added to existing claims by Wonderful as well as the UFW. It followed the ALRB’s certification last month that the union narrowly prevailed in a yearlong campaign to represent more than 600 employees of Wonderful Nurseries.
Wonderful is trying to overturn the certification. It has filed declarations by 148 employees, many of whom said they signed UFW union authorization cards only because they were offered $600 payments that turned out to have been pandemic recovery checks paid for by the federal government.
The UFW denies deceiving employees to get them to sign up for union membership. It says the company has intimidated workers and given some of them time off to protest the ALRB, including at a demonstration last month in Visalia, while refusing such permission to those sympathetic to the union. The company denies the accusations.
Wonderful Nurseries worker Nuria Jimenez, standing among dozens of
her co-workers Tuesday morning along Truxtun, said she was there to protest being unionized against her wishes.
“The majority of us don’t want it,” Jimenez said. She added that the ALRB should have taken workers’ protests into full account before certifying the union’s representation, and that the company “has nothing to do with” Tuesday’s demonstration.
Sitting outside Tuesday’s hearing, a Virginia staff attorney with the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation said he is representing about 20 Wonderful workers at no charge. He noted his firm filed for intervenor status in the hearing that began Tuesday but was denied.
“These people were victimized,” he said. “The union used deceit and fraud.”
But UFW Vice President Erika Navarrete, who some of the workers have alleged tricked them into signing union authorization cards by saying the paperwork was only for $600 relief checks, told reporters Tuesday the accusations are false.
“It’s a lie. It’s a complete lie,” Navarrete said. She asserted the workers are being manipulated by Wonderful, adding “The workers are afraid and they have to do what the company wants.”
Montgomery’s complaint raises specific, new allegations Wonderful committed an unfair labor practice when, in a series of meetings in late February and early March, a labor consultant and a pair of human resources employees spoke with company workers about the UFW’s unionization drive.
In a meeting with consultant Raul Calvo, the complaint alleges, workers “were not told that they could leave the meeting.” It said he offered to help workers find out whether they had signed union authorization cards.
At a separate meeting that month, a human resources worker told workers the company “ask(s) that each one of you firmly not to sign an authorization card,” Monday’s complaint states.
“We want to be able to work one on one with you without the interference of a union,” the HR person allegedly told workers.
Those and other actions “interfered with, restrained and coerced their employees in the exercise of their right to engage in concerted activity for the purpose of mutual aide or protection,” according to Montgomery’s complaint.
Her filing seeks an order requiring the company and its representatives to cease and desist from interfering in ag workers’ rights. It also asks that the company stop interrogating workers about their union support and that it stop disseminating misrepresentations, among other actions.
On Tuesday evening, Wonderful Nurseries President Rob Yraceburu said the ALRB’s complaint “shows once again they are more interested in shamelessly backing the UFW than protecting farmworkers or safeguarding the integrity of a union vote that, in this case, was so clearly fraudulent.”
“Bringing these claims on the eve of a hearing they have repeatedly delayed is a slap in the face of workers who have been protesting for weeks for the opportunity to be heard,” Yraceburu continued. “It also shows the staff don’t care about the law, because there is absolutely nothing in the ‘card check’ law that prevents Wonderful Nurseries from providing farmworkers with the counsel and support they were seeking, especially when the state labor board and the UFW had abdicated that role.”