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VT Condemns the ETHNIC CLEANSING OF PALESTINIANS by USA\/Israel<\/h4>\n
$ 280 BILLION US TAXPAYER DOLLARS INVESTED since 1948 in US\/Israeli Ethnic Cleansing and Occupation Operation; $ 150B direct “aid” and $ 130B in “Offense” contracts
\nSource: Embassy of Israel, Washington, D.C. and US Department of State.<\/p>\n
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May 17, 2024\u00a0Michael Hiltzik\u00a0\u00a0LOS ANGELES TIMES<\/a><\/p>\n Wonderful Co.\u2019s billionaire owners Stewart and Lynda Resnick: philanthropists, industrialists and union adversaries. (Ryan Miller\/WireImage),Ryan Miller<\/p>\n Los Angeles-based Wonderful Co. \u2014 the world\u2019s largest pistachio and almond grower, the purveyor of Fiji Water, Pom pomegranate juice and Justin wines, and owner of the Teleflora flower service \u2014 wants you to know that it\u2019s committed to\u00a0\u201csustainable farming and business practices\u201d<\/a>\u00a0and sees its employees as \u201ca guiding force for good.\u201d<\/p>\n Wonderful\u2019s owners, the Beverly Hills billionaires Lynda and Stewart Resnick, say their \u201ccalling\u201d is \u201cto leave people and the planet better than we found them.\u201d<\/p>\n Here\u2019s another side of the company. Since February, it has been engaged in a ferocious battle with the United Farm Workers over the UFW\u2019s campaign to unionize more than 600 Wonderful Nurseries workers in the Central Valley.<\/p>\n \u2018We ask each of you firmly not to sign an authorization card.\u2019<\/p><\/blockquote>\n \u2014 Anti-union script read to Wonderful Nursery workers by company officials<\/p>\n Having lost a series of motions before the California Agricultural Labor Relations Board to delay a mandate that it reach a contract with the UFW as soon as June 3 or have terms imposed by the board, Wonderful on Monday unleashed a nuclear attack:\u00a0a lawsuit\u00a0<\/a>seeking to have the 2022 and 2023 state laws governing the unionization process\u00a0declared unconstitutional<\/a>.<\/p>\n If it succeeds, California\u2019s legal protections for farmworkers could be rolled back to conditions that prevailed before C\u00e9sar Chavez\u2019s campaigns for farm unionization in the 1960s.<\/p>\n \u201cThis is an attack on farmworkers\u2019 rights,\u201d says Elizabeth Strater, the UFW\u2019s director of strategic campaigns. Farm employers \u201cwill do everything they can to prevent workers from empowering themselves and lifting themselves out of poverty.\u201d<\/p>\n Wonderful\u2019s lawsuit takes a page from arguments made against the National Labor Relations Board by Trader Joe\u2019s and Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX. Both companies, facing NLRB regulatory actions, are contending that the NLRB, which Congress established in 1935, is unconstitutional.<\/p>\n If you like this article, please sign up for Snapshot, Portside\u2019s daily summary.Email<\/p>\n (One summary e-mail a day, you can\u00a0change anytime<\/a>, and Portside is always free.)<\/p>\n Wonderful contends that provisions of the state\u2019s agricultural labor code violate its rights of due process guaranteed by both the state and U.S. constitutions.<\/p>\n At issue is a UFW drive to represent more than 600 of Wonderful Nurseries employees that began in early 2023. The UFW ultimately presented the labor board with signed cards from more than half the employees giving the UFW authority to represent them in collective bargaining on a contract, a process known as a \u201ccard check.\u201d<\/p>\n May 14, 2024<\/p>\n The board certified the union as the workers\u2019 representative on March 1, triggering a tight deadline aimed at prompting the union and the company to reach a contract.<\/p>\n BUSINESS<\/a><\/p>\n April 22, 2024<\/p>\n As often happens in hard-fought union campaigns, this one has generated a cross fire of allegations of unfair labor practices from both sides \u2014 the company asserting that the union defrauded workers into signing the representation cards, the union asserting that the company browbeat more than 100 workers into revoking their authorizations to drive the approval rate below the required 50%.<\/p>\n Accounts from the workers themselves vary. As\u00a0my colleagues Rebecca Plevin and Melissa Gomez have reported<\/a>, there have been complaints about poor working conditions at Wonderful along with hope that a union would help upgrade standards. Other workers say they misunderstood that signing an authorization card was tantamount to joining the UFW.<\/p>\n Some workers said they had second thoughts about signing the cards after meetings with a company-hired union-buster, Raul Calvo, who told them the union would take 3% of their pay for dues. In late March, some 100 Wonderful workers staged an anti-union protest at the ALRB offices in Visalia, but the UFW has alleged that the rally was the\u00a0product of company coercion<\/a>. Wonderful said at the time that it had no involvement in the protest and didn\u2019t pay the workers for their time.<\/p>\n \u201cThese workers are so vulnerable,\u201d the UFW\u2019s Strater says. Many are undocumented or have other reasons to worry about job security, arguably making them receptive to management directives.<\/p>\n In this case, another party has weighed in \u2014 the Agricultural Labor Relations Board, an independent state agency. Following an investigation, the board\u2019s general counsel, Julia Montgomery, alleged that Wonderful trampled its workers\u2019 unionization rights through numerous anti-union actions, including\u00a0coercing them to submit declarations rescinding their authorizations<\/a>. Wonderful has\u00a0denied most of the allegations<\/a>.<\/p>\n Wonderful says that the workers submitted their declarations voluntarily,\u00a0\u201cwithout any request having been made\u201d<\/a>\u00a0by the company. Montgomery\u2019s allegations, however, are mighty specific. She cites a series of meetings that were overtly aimed at persuading the workers to back away from the union.<\/p>\n That process began with employee meetings addressed by Calvo and proceeded to sessions in which workers met with Wonderful human resources personnel, Montgomery alleged. At those meetings, the company representatives read from a Spanish-language script stating that the union could have obtained workers\u2019 signatures without their knowledge, that they would be deprived of the opportunity for a secret vote on unionization and encouraging them to sign a declaration revoking their authorization cards.<\/p>\n March 13, 2024<\/p>\n \u201cWe ask each of you firmly not to sign an authorization card,\u201d the script read. In a line that sounds like it came fresh out of the playbook of anti-union companies such as Starbucks, the script stated that the company wants \u201cto be able to work one on one with you without the interference of a union.\u201d<\/p>\n Some workers were led into a large conference room, where company representatives were assigned \u201cto help the worker draft the declaration\u201d revoking the authorization cards, Montgomery asserted. Some agents typed up declarations for the workers and handed them to the workers to sign.<\/p>\n A few words about the plaintiffs in this lawsuit:<\/p>\n The Resnicks are prominent philanthropists and political donors (mostly to Democrats). Their companies\u2019 effects on the environment and California agriculture generally are checkered. Indeed, their most eye-catching charitable donation, a\u00a0record-breaking $750-million pledge<\/a>\u00a0to Caltech in 2019 for research into climate change and \u201cenvironmental sustainability,\u201d isn\u2019t inconsistent with a desire to \u201cgreenwash\u201d some of their other activities.<\/p>\n As I previously wrote<\/a>, while it might be churlish to suggest that the gift was devoid of genuine altruistic impulses, it would be naive to assume that altruism is the whole story.<\/p>\n A few years earlier, the Resnicks\u2019 Justin Vineyards had been caught\u00a0clear-cutting an oak forest<\/a>\u00a0near Paso Robles to make room for new grape plantings. The work was halted by San Luis Obispo County authorities, and the firm eventually agreed to donate the 380-acre parcel to a land conservancy.<\/p>\n Although the Resnicks say they are \u201cdedicated to our role as environmental stewards,\u201d their Fiji Water subsidiary looks like the antithesis of environmental sustainability. It profits from transporting water in plastic bottles more than 5,500 miles from the island nation to California and beyond, places that already have abundant water.<\/p>\n Wonderful\u2019s pistachio and almond orchards have complicated efforts to apportion water among the state\u2019s competing stakeholders. Because the trees require watering in wet years or dry, their acreage can\u2019t be fallowed during dry spells.<\/p>\n That has made the water demand of the agricultural sector less flexible, and arguably has contributed to the devastating\u00a0decline of the state\u2019s salmon fishery<\/a>\u00a0and the drying out of rivers and streams that once supported a diverse population of fish and birds.<\/p>\n Oct. 30, 2023<\/p>\n This isn\u2019t the first time that the Resnicks have wrapped themselves in the U.S. Constitution to fend off a regulatory agency. In 2010, they asserted that the Federal Trade Commission infringed their 1st Amendment rights by holding that they made \u201cfalse and misleading\u201d and \u201cunsubstantiated\u201d representations about the health benefits of their Pom pomegranate juice, which amounted to unlawful marketing.<\/p>\n The company pitched the juice as \u201chealth in a bottle.\u201d Wonderful put up billboards with the words\u00a0\u201cCheat Death\u201d<\/a>\u00a0next to a picture of the bottle. Its ads claimed Pom has beneficial effects on prostate cancer (\u201cDrink to prostate health\u201d), cardiovascular health and even erectile dysfunction \u2014 all of which claims were judged scientifically dubious by regulators. The company fought the FTC up to the U.S. Supreme Court, which rejected its appeal.<\/p>\n The 2022 and 2023 laws that Wonderful is challenging \u2014 indeed, the very creation of the ALRB in 1975 \u2014 reflect a reality known in California for more than a century: Bringing labor rights to farmworkers is notoriously difficult.<\/p>\n The first major farm union organizing drive in the state, among hops pickers in Wheatland, north of Sacramento, was broken up by four companies of the National Guard called out by Gov. Hiram Johnson in 1913. A statewide dragnet for organizers from the Industrial Workers of the World, or Wobblies, ensued, followed by hundreds of arrests. No further significant farm organizing took place for 16 years.<\/p>\n In 1975, a state law passed at the urging of C\u00e9sar Chavez\u2019s UFW gave union organizers the right to meet with workers on the farms where they toiled. But the Supreme Court, voting on partisan lines, struck it down in 2021\u2014the law allowed organizers to\u00a0\u201cinvade the growers\u2019 property,\u201d<\/a>\u00a0as Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote.<\/p>\n To address the heightened difficulty agricultural unions faced, the state Legislature established the card check process in 2022 and 2023. The laws incorporated a tight timeline governing certification and contract bargaining, and stipulated mandatory mediation if no contract is reached with a set period.<\/p>\n April 24, 2023<\/p>\n The goal was to address \u201cthe basic failing of labor law both at the federal and state level, which is delay,\u201d said William B. Gould IV, emeritus professor of law at Stanford and a former chairman of the National Labor Relations Board and the state Agricultural Labor Relations Board.<\/p>\n \u201cDelay works against the interests of workers and unions, because employers hope that they\u2019ll grow weary,\u201d Gould told me. The tight deadlines were designed to place the burden of delay on the employers.<\/p>\n Wonderful maintains in its lawsuit, filed in Kern County state court, that the accelerated process has deprived employers of constitutionally protected due process rights by allowing a union to be certified by card check before the employers have a chance to object \u2014 effectively rendering the certification and the negotiating deadline\u00a0faits accomplis<\/em>.<\/p>\n That\u2019s not quite true, however. The law allows anyone to file objections within five days of certification. After that, any certification can be revoked if the employers\u2019 objections are later upheld at a hearing, and any mandated contract can be invalidated. Indeed, Wonderful filed its objections in time, citing the workers\u2019 declarations; an ALRB hearing on its objections has been underway for weeks.<\/p>\n What appears especially to irk Wonderful is that the board has twice rejected its motions to suspend, or stay, the certification and negotiation procedure until after it rules on the company\u2019s objections. The board responded that the law doesn\u2019t provide for such a stay.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/figure>\nWonderful Co. sues to halt California card-check law that made it easier to unionize farmworkers<\/a><\/h3>\n
Column: The UAW sends a lightning bolt into anti-union states with a huge victory at a VW plant<\/a><\/h3>\n
<\/a><\/figure>\nColumn: A Trump judge eviscerates a pro-worker regulation at the request of big employers<\/a><\/h3>\n
Column: American unions have finally remembered how to win<\/a><\/h3>\n
<\/a><\/figure>\nColumn: Julie Su would be a perfect Labor secretary. That\u2019s why Big Business hates her<\/a><\/h3>\n