Contested Ballots Delay Results of Farm Worker Vote

It didn’t bother Oxnard farm worker Eduardo Vasquez that no conclusion had been reached late Wednesday in a historic election to decide which union, if any, should represent workers at one of the nation’s largest strawberry growers.

He had been waiting for hours, but not a single ballot had been counted in the election pitting the United Farm Workers against a rival union, the Coastal Berry of California Farmworkers Committee.

And he would have to be up before dawn this morning to return to the fields at Coastal Berry.

But Vasquez said he would wait as long as necessary outside the UFW office near downtown Oxnard for the results to come in.

“There is not a more important issue in our lives,” said Vasquez, standing outside the office where dozens of supporters waved red-and-black UFW flags and periodically burst into pro-union chants. “I’m 100% sure the UFW will win, but I want to be here to watch it happen.”

Officials with the Agricultural Labor Relations Board, which referees labor disputes and oversees union elections, had hoped that the results would be known by 9 p.m. But 80 to 100 ballots were being contested and the count was delayed for several hours to resolve those challenges.

The only thing UFW supporters learned for sure was that 1,300 Coastal Berry employees had participated in the election--640 in Oxnard and 660 in Watsonville and Salinas.

Oxnard workers have been key to the UFW’s nearly four-year campaign to win a contract at Coastal Berry, a crucial first step in a larger effort to unionize California’s strawberry industry.

The industry has experienced rapid growth in Ventura County in recent years, an agricultural boom reflected at Coastal Berry’s Oxnard operation. The company is farming 330 acres locally this season compared with 110 acres last year.

In addition, about 650 of Coastal Berry’s 1,500 employees work in the Oxnard area. Last year, the company employed about 220 local workers.

Workers at the company, which farms about 1,200 acres of strawberries, raspberries and blackberries in Monterey, Santa Cruz and Ventura counties, narrowly voted last year to join Coastal Berry of California Farmworkers Committee.

The UFW protested the results, arguing that the election should be invalidated because the company failed to notify 162 of its workers in Oxnard that they could cast ballots.

A labor judge agreed and threw out the results in November. Earlier this month, the Agricultural Labor Relations Board upheld the judge’s ruling.

Since then, UFW organizers and representatives of the farm workers committee have been lobbying Coastal Berry employees in Oxnard and Central California. Those efforts were evident Tuesday as officials with the state labor board set up polling booths in four of the company’s Oxnard fields.

Several strawberry pickers who cast ballots wore red-and-black UFW buttons on their long-sleeved shirts and bandannas to show support for that union. Others sported white hats displaying the UFW emblem with a diagonal slash running through it.

For the UFW, the election is the culmination of a historic campaign to unionize more than 20,000 strawberry pickers in the state’s $600-million-a-year industry, which is known for its low wages, poor benefits and stoop labor.

Ventura County labor lawyer Rob Roy said anything short of a decisive victory at Coastal Berry will represent a setback for the UFW. He noted that the union had received unprecedented backing from the AFL-CIO to mount the current organizing drive as the cornerstone of a strategy to reverse more than a decade of declining membership and dwindling influence.

Moreover, Roy said that even if the UFW wins at Coastal Berry, he doesn’t believe that it will pave the way for the union to organize strawberry pickers at other ranches in Ventura County or the rest of the state.

“I don’t think the industry is looking at this as the beginning of some kind of domino effect,” said Roy, president of the Ventura County Agricultural Assn., which represents growers. “I don’t really see this as a portent for them having a number of other elections throughout the rest of the industry.”

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