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Farm labor board expected to uphold ruling invalidating strawberry vote

Nov. 10, 1998

Farm labor board expected to uphold ruling invalidating strawberry vote

Members of the Agricultural Labor Relations Board are expected to affirm a Nov. 5 decision by a hearing judge throwing out last summer’s election at Coastal Berry Co., the nation’s largest strawberry employer, according to the United Farm Workers.

An anti-union group calling itself the Coastal Berry Farmworkers Committee won the July 23 voting at Coastal Berry by a margin of 113 votes (Committee 523 votes; no-union 410 votes). The UFW refused to participate, terming the balloting a "sham" after filing a series of unfair labor practice charges with the ALRB. "Company foremen and supervisors orchestrated a violent July 1 attack in the fields on pro-union workers and peace officers, and then went crew to crew forcing pickers to sign the Coastal Berry Farmworkers Committee election petition on threat of being fired," says UFW spokesman Marc Grossman.

After hearing a full day of testimony on Oct. 16, the ALRB investigative hearing judge, Thomas Sobel, issued a 31-page decision last week that concluded 162 Coastal Berry workers in Ventura County had not been notified about the balloting. Since those votes could have changed the outcome, he "set aside" the election.

Sobel’s ruling is in line with the position taken by the ALRB when significant numbers of workers were denied the right to vote, including the Sequoia Orange Co. case from 1987, which the judge cited in his ruling. "Since it would be inconsistent for the board to reject Judge Sobel’s decision, we expect the ALRB to affirm his ruling," Grossman says.

The UFW will continue its organizing among Coastal Berry workers when the strawberry harvest gets underway next year. Meanwhile, the union is also waiting for ALRB General Counsel Paul Richardson to issue complaints–or indictments–out of charges filed by the UFW in mid-July that foremen and supervisors used violence and harassment against Coastal Berry workers.

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