Card Check – End of the Secret Ballot?

Michael Olson’s Food Chain Radio Show #1329

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Will “Card Check” labor law put an end to the secret ballot?

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Yes

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GUEST: Norm Groot, Executive Director Monterey County Farm Bureau

Twenty-five years ago, I happened to see what I thought to be the red flags of the United Farm Worker Union fluttering in the parking lot of the Coastal Berry Company in Watsonville, California.

Michael Olson Food Chain Radio – Farm Workers, Card Check and End of the Secret Ballot?

Thinking that another UFW labor action was in the works, I pulled into the Coastal Berry parking lot and took out my voice recorder.  But when I asked for the UFW rep, my request was met with puzzled looks and nervous grins.   Finally, an English-speaker emerged from the crowd to say, “These workers are not demonstrating for the right to join the UFW, they are demonstrating because they do not want to be forced to join the UFW!”

Having been given a little taste, I went for a bigger bite, and soon learned that the Coastal Berry Company was not really in the business of growing berries at all.  The company was purchased by political operatives with the sole intent of growing the United Farm Workers Union.  But in spite of their now owning the company, the efforts of the political operatives failed to grow the Union.  And during the quarter century since, the United Farmworker Union has pretty much faded from the public eye.

A new group of political operatives has now taken up the crusade of establishing a farm worker union with legislation granting organizing authority with a simple majority assent as denoted on a card or petition.  California Governor Gavin Newsom has signed into law Assembly Bill 2183, which gives California’s farmworkers the right to organize a union with a simple check on a card.  Will “Card Check” as the legislation has come to be known,  give union organizers the upper hand in negotiations with farm laborers and those who rely on the laborers?  Will “Card Check” give farm labor unions the political and economic clout enjoyed by public employee unions?

Leave a comment below: Will “Card Check” put an end to the secret ballot?

Tune in here, for the syndicated Michael Olson Food Chain Radio Show #1329 October 22, 2022 Saturday 9AM Pacific

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Michael Olson’s Three Laws of the Food Chain

#1 Agriculture is the foundation upon which we build all our sand castles.

#2 The farther we go from the source of our food, the less control we have over what’s in that food.

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