Hundreds of farm workers from across California will attend oral arguments on Tuesday, Sept. 5 before the California Supreme Court on grower challenges to the state’s Mandatory Mediation and Conciliation law. It was enacted in 2002 because the great majority of farm workers who voted for a union since the state farm labor law passed in 1975 never won the union contracts for which they voted. The Mandatory Mediation law lets farm workers request neutral state mediators to hammer out contracts when the parties can’t agree on them. If it is overturned, thousands of California farm workers will lose their chance to achieve the benefits union contracts bring.

Chiefly orchestrating the legal challenge is Gerawan Farming Inc., a giant Fresno-based tree fruit producer that already owes its thousands of workers more than $10 million under terms of a union contract issued by a state mediator and approved by the Agricultural Labor Relations Board in 2013.

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ALRB Chairman William B. Gould IV wrote in a concurring opinion that “The voluminous record and numerous findings of the [administrative judge] in this case clearly established the illegal conduct of Gerawan, and the fact that it is guilty of extensive misconduct [showing] the employer unlawfully inserted itself into the electoral process through a variety of means (Page 79).” Gould ruled that “though the decertification was filed by employees, by the ways found by the [judge], and affirmed by [the board] decision, the employer became a principal party to that effort (P. 76).” Both state and national labor law make it illegal for an employer to be involved in deciding union representation for its workers. …