The Wonderful Company suffered a setback in a lawsuit against the Farmworker Act

from Jeanne KuangCalMatters

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California giant Wonderful Company suffered a setback Tuesday in its bid to cancel a new law on agricultural workers’ unions when an appeals court threw out his case against state labor regulators.

The ruling by a three-judge panel of the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals in Fresno upheld a controversial new law backed by the United Farm Workers that was intended to encourage organizing in a heavily immigrant workforce. The law allows agricultural workers to express their support for union representation using a signed card, bypassing the traditional in-person vote with a secret ballot usually held on the employer’s property.

The Wonderful Company — owner of the brand Wonderful Pistachios and Fiji Water, Pom pomegranate juices and Halos oranges — sued the state Agricultural Labor Relations Board last year, trying to overturn the law that Gov. Gavin Newsom signed in 2023.

The lawsuit, which claims the law is unconstitutional, came after the United Farm Workers filed a petition with enough signatures to represent about 600 workers at the company’s grape nursery in Wasco.

In a contested public disputethe company accused union organizers of tricking workers into signing pro-union cards and provided over 100 employee signatures certifying that they had been duped; in turn, the union accused the company of illegally intimidating workers into withdrawing their support. Regulators at the Agricultural Labor Board filed charges against Wonderful after investigating the allegations.

All of these allegations were heard before the labor board last spring, when Wonderful took the matter to court, arguing that the new law deprived the company of a fair trial. Kern County Judge initially suspended board proceedings, but the appellate court allowed them to continue last fall. After weeks of hearings this year, the labor board has yet to rule on whether the UFW can represent Wonderful employees.

Meanwhile, the company closed the Wasco nursery and donated it to the University of California, Davis, making the question of an actual union on the jobsite moot.

In the new ruling, the appeals court judges sharply rebuked the company for suing the union instead of waiting for the labor board’s decision.

“Wonderful filed this petition despite approximately 50 years of unbroken precedent that an employer may not directly challenge a union certification decision in court except in extraordinary and extremely rare circumstances that Wonderful does not attempt to show are present here,” Judge Rosendo Peña wrote.

Elizabeth Strater, vice president of the United Farm Workers, said the ruling reaffirms that “every farmworker in California has rights under the law, and those rights must be protected.”

But Wonderful Company general counsel Craig Cooper dismissed the decision as just a matter of time: “the decision expressly does not address the merits of Wonderful Nurseries’ constitutional challenge.”

This article was originally published on CalMatters and is republished under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives license.