Farm Group Fights New Labor Law

Farm industry groups filed suit this week to overturn a new law aimed at resolving deadlocked labor disputes, arguing that it denies the constitutional rights of growers and workers to bargain for contracts.

The lawsuit, filed on behalf of grower groups around the state, challenges a farm labor mediation law championed by the United Farm Workers union and signed in September by Gov. Gray Davis.

The law permits state agriculture officials to impose mandatory mediation in cases where farm labor negotiations reach an impasse.

Filed Monday in Sacramento County Superior Court, the suit contends that state government has no business butting into contract talks between private parties and seeks to have the new law wiped off the books.

“We believe it is an unconstitutional law,” said Rob Roy, a farm industry attorney and president of the Ventura County Agricultural Assn., one of half a dozen grower groups that brought the suit. Other groups include the Western Growers Assn. and the California Farm Bureau Federation.

“Virtually all of our clients could be subjected to this law,” Roy said. “This is little more than affirmative action for the UFW.”

Supporters dismissed the legal challenge, saying they’ve already looked carefully at issues that could have torpedoed the new law. They are confident they can win the legal fight and move forward with a measure they say is necessary to end decades of failed contract negotiations for farm workers.

“I think it’s baseless, frivolous and a waste of the farm bureau’s money,” said state Senate President Pro Tem John Burton (D-San Francisco), who carried the bill. “But I guess they have a lot of money because they never pay their farm workers enough.”

Under the new law, farm workers can ask the state Agricultural Labor Relations Board to impose mandatory mediation in cases where contract negotiations with growers have stalled.

The mediator will have the power to propose the terms of a binding contract if the two sides can’t reach an agreement after 30 days of mediation.

Either side can appeal the contract terms to the labor relations board. The board’s decision can be appealed to the state Court of Appeal or California Supreme Court.

The lawsuit contends that the new law actually imposes binding arbitration -- not mediation -- on negotiations between farmers and workers.

The lawsuit further contends that the mediation process violates various provisions of the state and U.S. constitutions, including claims that agriculture employers will be denied due process and equal protection of the law by having contracts forced upon them.

Joseph R. Grodin, a professor at UC’s Hastings College of the Law and a former associate justice of the California Supreme Court, said the lawsuit raises some interesting issues, especially since this kind of mediation arrangement hasn’t existed before in the private sector.

“I would guess that the law will eventually be upheld,” said Grodin, an original member of the state’s Agricultural Labor Relations Board when it was formed in 1975. “But there are some issues where the court is going to have to do some careful thinking.”

Farm groups say the issue is a matter of economic survival. They have maintained that the new law will cripple the state’s $27-billion agriculture industry and put farmers out of business.

“We indicated every step of the way [through the legislative process] that the bill was patently illegal and unconstitutional,” said Mike Webb, a lobbyist for the Western Growers Assn.

If it survives the legal challenge, the new law could get one of its first tests at the Pictsweet Mushroom Farm in Ventura, where workers have been trying for years to hammer out a UFW contract.

The company already has been contacted by the UFW to restart contract negotiations under the new law

UFW spokesman Marc Grossman said the grower provides a prime example of why the new law is necessary. Workers there have been without a contract since 1987 and talks in recent years between the company and the union have failed to progress.

“The farm workers don’t believe that growers have a claim,” Grossman said. “Farm workers have voted for years in state-supervised, secret-ballot elections, but many have never gotten what they voted for. That is what this law is about.”