by Samuel Messidor
The California-based agriculture monopoly Wonderful Company has won in their lawsuit against the State of California seeking to block the automatic recognition of unionized farmworkers at one of their greenhouse facilities. Last week, the judge ordered all union-related proceedings at Wonderful to halt.
About 600 farmworkers were set to join the United Farm Workers (UFW) in Wasco, CA, after signing union authorization cards. Card signatures are enough to certify a union local in agriculture under a 2023 California labor law, circumventing the usual cumbersome National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) elections process that gives ample time for companies to employ union-busting firms and threaten workers. Wonderful challenges the 2023 law as unconstitutional and opening the door to fraud from unions because it allows for cards to be signed off the worksite—in other words, Wonderful is concerned that the company now has less room to commit fraud itself.
Judge Bernard C. Barmann, Jr.’s ruling halted challenges from both the UFW and state officials alleging that the company held illegal captive-audience meetings and coerced workers into rescinding their union authorization signatures. Wonderful alleges that the union tricked workers into signing the cards during a meeting to help workers sign up for federal pandemic relief, as if two topics could not be covered in one meeting.
Judge Barmann, Jr. said that a company should not have to accept a union while they are contesting its right to exist as unconstitutional. This means the state bureaucracy can be tied up into a noose against workers’ organizing efforts, despite the supposedly pro-labor California card check law. Wonderful’s own suit was joined by two other agro monopolies who filed in support of the company.
The waylaid 2023 card check bill was part of the Biden-Harris supposedly “pro-labor” track record, now sinking in the mire of the ruling class’s bureaucracy.
Judges have increasingly stepped into processes usually managed by the federal and state labor relations bureaucracies as part of the ongoing battle among factions of the ruling class for control over the bureaucratic state apparatuses. Another recent example is the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) proposed heat safety rules that mandate access to water and periodic heat breaks for both inside and outside workers, including farmworkers, which has similarly come under attack.
Wonderful Co monopolizes a vast amount of California’s water supply, largely gifted to them by the state, gulping up natural resources like land and water and exploiting workers—the majority of whom are migrants with few legal protections—for their dizzying profits. California Democrat Governor Newsom, who signed the 2023 bill into law, counts the billionaire couple owners of Wonderful Co, the Resniks, as top campaign donors.
