Labor Faction Loses Majority on Farm Board

Gov. George Deukmejian on Thursday appointed attorney Gregory L. Gonot to a five-year term on the state Agricultural Labor Relations Board, a move that means pro-labor interests will lose their majority on the board for the first time since the agency was created in 1975.

Gonot, 38, is currently senior staff counsel to agency board member John P. McCarthy. He replaces Jerome Waldie, whose term expired Tuesday. Waldie, a former Democratic congressman from Contra Costa County, has been the sharpest critic of Deukmejian’s attempt to change the way the fractious agency has operated.

No ‘Partisan Philosophy’

Gonot, a registered Republican, said in a telephone interview: “I’m not bringing any kind of partisan philosophy to the board. I believe in balance, of not deciding anything on the basis of any kind of ideology.

“My basic approach to fulfilling the duties of a board member will be to apply the California Agricultural Labor Relations Act in a straightforward, fair and impartial manner,” he said.

The replacement of Waldie by Gonot delighted farm-owner interests. Henry J. Voss, president of the California Farm Bureau Federation, characterized the appointment as “continued evidence of Gov. Deukmejian’s effort to instill impartiality on the board.”

“Nobody could be happier than I am,” said Daryl Arnold, president of the Western Growers Committee in Irvine. “Waldie never gave a vote for a grower in any case. This will be a change for equality.”

Diana Lyons, an attorney for the United Farm Workers, said she expected Gonot to represent growers. “Rather than having an advocate on the board consistently reminding the agency that the statute requires that farm workers be protected and encouraged in the exercise of their rights,” she said, “we will have a constant reminder to look out for the growers’ rights.”

The degree of enmity that has developed between the union and the ALRB was reflected in a statement issued Thursday by Roberto Delacruz, the UFW’s political director: “The appointment is irrelevant. It doesn’t matter anymore because the ALRB is no longer a place farm workers can go to resolve their grievances.”

Gonot’s appointment to the five-member board requires state Senate confirmation. However, he could serve for up to a year without being confirmed.

A major shift in the way the agency has operated began three years ago when Deukmejian took office. During his 1982 campaign, he accused the ALRB of a pro-union bias and pledged to change its direction.

Deukmejian cut the agency’s budget by a third and appointed David Stirling, a former Republican state assemblyman, as the agency’s general counsel.

Gatekeeping Role

The role of general counsel is crucial to the ALRB’s operations. Stirling is, in essence, the gatekeeper, the person who determines which unfair labor practice cases are filed. If the general counsel decides not to file a case, there is nothing the five-member board can do about it.

On some matters, however, the liberal board majority has been able to overturn some of Stirling’s decisions. Now that the composition of the board has shifted, observers expect his power to increase.

Stirling has dramatically reduced the number of unfair labor practice cases the board has filed against growers, according both to a report released in May by the state auditor general’s office and to figures provided by ALRB officials. In the three fiscal years before Stirling took office, the agency filed 1,188 unfair practice charges against employers, compared to 482 in the next three fiscal years.

“The board only reacts to cases brought to us by the general counsel,” said board member Patrick W. Henning, a former state labor commissioner, who was appointed to the board in December, 1982, by Gov. Edmund G. Brown Jr. “If he has lowered the number of cases going to complaint, we will be issuing fewer decisions. This year we will issue the least number in our history.”

Controversial Tenure

Stirling also has generated considerable controversy through other actions. For example, he has tried to unilaterally settle cases for less money than board members thought was fair after courts had ordered back pay for aggrieved workers.

Then, in October, Stirling made a trip to Washington, at taxpayer expense, to speak out against the farm workers’ grape boycott, as a spokesman for Deukmejian. This prompted charges by Cesar Chavez, president of the union, that Stirling could not impartially perform his duties. The general counsel retorted that he was merely responding to Chavez’s attacks on him and the way the agency was being run.

Still, in November, leaders of eight major religious bodies, including Archbishop Roger Mahony of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles, urged Deukmejian to fire Stirling, a suggestion the governor quickly spurned. Mahony served as the ALRB’s first chairman, until 1977.

Finally, in mid-December, the state Public Employment Relations Board accused Stirling of violating the rights of his employees. The complaint was based on allegations from nine current and former ALRB workers--including an attorney fired from the Salinas office--who contend that Stirling retaliated against them for publicly objecting to his campaign against the grape boycott. Stirling predicted that he would be cleared at a hearing to be held in February.

Increased Power

With the new makeup of the board, Stirling may gain power in the conduct of union representation elections, the hiring of agency personnel and in the settlement of unfair labor practice cases, Henning said.

Gonot is Deukmejian’s third appointment to the board. Two years ago he reappointed McCarthy, a former agribusiness executive, who originally had been named by Brown in February, 1978. Then, in July, 1984, he tapped Jyrl Ann James-Massengale, a Los Angeles attorney, as board chairwoman. James-Massengale, who worked for the nation’s largest labor law firm representing management clients, was the first woman and the first black on the board.

Gonot’s lengthy experience as a board attorney was a major factor in his selection by Deukmejian, according to Kevin Brett, a spokesman for the governor.

Gonot graduated from UC Davis with a bachelor’s degree in 1969 and received a law degree from UC Berkeley in 1972. He was a lawyer for the state Department of Water Resources from 1973 to 1975 and then worked for a year at the Pacific Legal Foundation, a conservative public-interest law firm.

He joined the Agricultural Labor Relations Board in 1976 and has worked there for the last nine years. His new job will pay $72,456 a year. He is married and has a 21-month-old daughter.

Must Resign Post

Gonot will have to give up his position as president of the Assn. of California State Attorneys and Administrative Law Judges.

In the interview, Gonot said he felt the agency had been “short on balance” in the past, reflecting a theme that was emphasized by Deukmejian in his gubernatorial campaign.

The new board member said he thought the board could expedite enforcement of its decisions by working harmoniously with the general counsel. Such harmony has not existed since Stirling took office.

The agency currently has a major problem dealing with a backlog of unenforced ALRB decisions in which workers are owed millions of dollars.

Deukmejian’s critics say the backlog stems in part from the governor’s decision to slash the agency’s budget from $9.6 million to $7 million in June, 1983. The backlog grew from 496 cases in December, 1982, to 1,091 in December, 1983, according to the state legislative analyst’s office. Then, in July, 1984, Deukmejian vetoed a $1-million legislative appropriation to hire investigators to help reduce the backlog.

Wayne Smith, the agency’s deputy general counsel, said the ALRB is now considering hiring some National Labor Relations Board employees on a temporary basis to attempt to clear the backlog. Bill Camp, the ALRB’s former public information officer, said this was only a partial solution.

$8-Million Budget

The agency, which now has an $8-million budget, has never had adequate funding or staff to enforce its decisions, he said, and it is not clear where the money to bring on extra, temporary workers will come from. “You can have any law you want on the books, but if you never allow any money in the budget to enforce the law, the law doesn’t mean anything,” Camp, now an aide to state Sen. David A. Roberti (D-Los Angeles), said.

McCarthy, the board’s senior member, said in a telephone interview that compliance is “one of the most important concerns we’ve got right now, but we should be caught up by mid-1986. There’s probably 30 to 40 ripe cases out there right now.”

Perhaps the largest of those cases involves Abatti Farms Inc., an El Centro produce company. In 1981 the ALRB ruled that the company had refused to bargain in good faith with the farm workers union, had illegally fired union activists and unlawfully interfered in an election to decertify the union as the bargaining agent for Abatti employees. It ordered the company to pay 1,000 workers additional wages and benefits back to 1979, representing the difference in what that they would have been getting if covered by a union contract during that period. The board calls this a “make whole” remedy.

Decision Upheld

That decision was upheld by state courts and in October, 1983, was allowed to stand by the U.S. Supreme Court. The ALRB staff estimated in its “make whole” order that the workers were owed at least $8.5 million in back pay and $1.5 million in interest.

However, soon thereafter, Stirling negotiated a settlement whereby Abatti would pay $1.7 million, including $490,000 it owed in another case and $161,000 in back payroll taxes. The board rejected the settlement unanimously. The matter remains unresolved.

Wayne Smith, the agency’s deputy general counsel, has said that he and Stirling would like to see a more limited use of the “make whole” remedy in the future. “In some instances, application of ‘make whole’ is an economic death penalty,” Smith said. He said that since Deukmejian became governor, the agency has distributed about $1.7 million in settlements from growers.

Waldie said he feared that the new board majority may now approve smaller damage settlements that the old board would have rejected, thus signaling growers that they will not face stiff penalties for violating the law.

Gonot said the Agricultural Labor Relations Act gives the board discretion about when to use the “make whole” remedy. “At one time the board was applying it wholesale,” he said. “Now it’s not being applied wholesale, but there’s a fairly low threshold for applying it. There will be some differences on when and where it will be applied. I have to look at the facts of the case.”

Gonot said that despite the fact that he frequently helped McCarthy write dissents to board decisions, that “doesn’t mean I’ll roll back board precedents.”

Expects Continuity

“I think there will be a fair amount of continuity,” he added. “In the past I’ve been involved in a lot of dissents, but there have been more times when I’ve been with the majority in finding an unfair labor practice. . . . If I couldn’t have stomached finding unfair labor practices I would have left this agency a long time ago.”

McCarthy said his former aide’s experience at the board will give him “a real leg up” in his new job. “He knows all the parties involved in the agency and has dealt with them extensively over that period of time.” He also predicted that he and Gonot would occasionally differ on issues, although they always agreed in the past.

But Kevin Robinson, one of Henning’s staff attorneys, expressed doubts about how independent Gonot would be. “I think it would be difficult for a board member not to listen to a board member he worked for,” he said.

He added: “Greg takes a management line. He narrows the interpretation of the (Agricultural Labor Relations) act whenever possible. It’s a pro-worker act that gave rights to farm workers they never had before.”

Along the same line, Waldie said shortly before he stepped down that he was not optimistic about the agency’s future and was dismayed about the recent past.

“We’ve slowed the pace of dismantling the agency and the act,” he said. “But we haven’t been able to prevent a 30% budget cut in the first year, a general counsel who refuses to enforce the act, a total turnover of the agency’s machinery to the grower community and their lawyers. It (the dismantling) will move much faster now.” STATE AGRICULTURAL LABOR RELATIONS BOARD MEMBERS

JYRL JAMES-MASSENGALE, chairwoman. Appointed July 24, 1984, as Gov. George Deukmejian’s first appointee to the board. Reappointed Jan. 1, 1985. Age 32. Attorney at the National Labor Relations Board, 1979-1980. Then practiced labor relations law in Los Angeles. Considered the most conservative member.

JOHN P. McCARTHY. Originally appointed by Gov. Edmund G. Brown Jr. on Feb. 21, 1978. Reappointed in 1979 and 1984. Age 49. Personnel manager for the Garin Co., 1963-73. Presiding mediator for Northern California, California State Mediation and Conciliation Service, 1973-78. Considered a moderate but tends to side with employers on major issues.

PATRICK W. HENNING. Appointed by Brown on Dec. 8, 1982. Age 39. Organizer for the Service Employees International Union from 1969-1973, and for the Hotel and Restaurant Employees Union, 1973-80. Special representative for the International Union of Operating Engineers, 1980-81. State labor commissioner, 1981-83. Considered pro worker.

JEROME WALDIE. Appointed by Brown April 20, 1981. Age 60. Member of the California Assembly, 1959-66. U.S. Representative, 1966-75. Chairman of the Federal Mine Safety and Health Review Commission, 1978-79. Executive director of the 1981 White House Conference on Aging. Considered the board’s most liberal member.

DAVID M. STIRLING. General counsel since Jan. 23, 1983. His confirmation was held up for more than 11 months by state Senate Democrats. Age 45. Practiced law, 1966-76, when elected to state Assembly from Whittier. Made unsuccessful bid for Republican nomination for attorney general in 1982.

JORGE CARRILLO.

Appointed Dec. 8, 1982, by Brown. Term expires Jan. 1, 1987. Age 35. Received B.A. from UC San Diego in 1972 and law degree from Stanford University in 1975. Has worked for the ALRB since leaving law school, first as staff attorney from 1975-79, next as regional attorney from 1979-1980, and then as executive secretary from 1980-82. Considered part of the board’s 3-2 liberal majority, but has sided with the conservatives on some issues, particularly in the last year.