Wonderful Co. sues California over law aimed at making it easier for farmworkers to unionize
President Joe Biden and Newsom, makes a host of products recognizable to most grocery store shoppers, including Halos mandarin oranges, Wonderful Pistachios, POM Wonderful pomegranate juice and Fiji Water brands. Farmworkers aren’t covered by federal rules for labor organizing in the United States.
But California, which harvests much of the country’s produce, enacted a law and created a special board in 1975 to protect their right to unionize. That came after the storied work of Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta to organize farmworkers across California under what later became the United Farm Workers.
But farmworker unionization has dropped precipitously in the years since, and today few such workers are organized in California. The law lets farmworkers unionize by collecting a majority of signatures without holding an election at a polling place — a condition proponents say protects workers from employers applying pressure or trying to retaliate against employees who vote to unionize.
A union is formed if more than half of workers sign an authorization card. Wonderful argues the law is unconstitutional by going too far in cutting employers out of the process.
Newsom's office said it was reviewing the lawsuit before responding and included his statement from when he signed the legislation that “California’s farmworkers are the lifeblood of our state, and they have the fundamental right to unionize and advocate for themselves in the workplace." Farm industry leaders have argued the lack of a secret ballot under the law makes workers vulnerable to coercion by unions and the elections susceptible to fraud. Wonderful said under the prior system, employers and union representatives were present at polling places to ensure a
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