Growers Want to Batter Workers With ‘Pro-Union’ Law

The giant American Farm Bureau Federation, which has vehemently opposed unionization of farm workers since its founding in 1920, is suddenly pushing a bill to include farm workers under the National Labor Relations Act for the first time.

It really would be amazing if the nation’s largest grower organization had reversed its historic opposition to the NLRA because it finally decided the law might help farm workers, who are still mired in poverty at the bottom of the nation’s economic ladder.

No way. Actually, the grower federation figures that it can use the supposedly pro-union law to protect growers from unions, a law it has called “the most basic of all federal labor protection laws.” The NLRA was adopted in 1935 to encourage workers to join unions because individually they are rarely able to cope with the immense power of corporate management.

The law hasn’t worked out quite like that, particularly under anti-union administrations such as President Reagan’s.

Still, it allows almost all workers--except those in agriculture--to decide by secret ballot whether they want to be represented by a union, and, in theory, it protects them from punishment by their bosses if they support a union.

Including agriculture under the federal law could help growers because, among other things, it prohibits secondary boycotts by unions. Those are boycotts against firms that buy goods from companies that are a union’s real target in a labor dispute. One of the best known examples is the boycott of California table grapes by Cesar Chavez’s United Farm Workers Union. The union pickets supermarkets selling the grapes.

Another example was the eight-year boycott of Campbell Soup Co., which ended two years ago in victory for the relatively unknown Farm Labor Organizing Committee (FLOC). That union now has contracts with Ohio and Michigan growers who supply Campbell, H. J. Heinz and Vlasic Foods.

But why are the growers worried about union strikes and boycotts, so worried that they now want agriculture to be included in the NLRA after they fought it so furiously since the federal labor law was adopted 53 years ago?

After all, unions still represent less than 1% of the country’s 2 million or so farm workers, after having tried to organize them for decades. And they aren’t growing perceptibly. And while a few boycotts are effective, most are not. California growers scornfully dismiss the UFW’s three-year grape boycott as if it were a speck of dust on a grower’s boot.

Maybe the nation’s growers secretly fear that Chavez’s internationally famous but pitifully small union, and the even smaller Toledo, Ohio-based FLOC, headed by Blademar Velasquez, are on the verge of some victories in their drive for new members.

Maybe growers are concerned about a more effective grape boycott that is finally getting some national attention because of the recent lengthy fast by Chavez and shorter fasts supporting the boycott by movie and TV stars and public officials.

But Chuck Fields, federation spokesman, says the group’s primary reason for supporting the bill is to get rid of even the threat of successful secondary boycotts or unionization.

To avoid those possibilities, the growers’ federation, aided by Los Angeles management attorney Joseph Herman, wrote and is pushing legislation introduced recently by Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah) to give each state the right to be included under the federal labor law.

The bill, along with outlawing secondary boycotts, would let growers use technicalities that abound in the NLRA to get seemingly endless delays in adjudicating disputes. Those legal maneuvers almost always work to the disadvantage of unions and workers.

California is the only state with a meaningful farm labor law. It is an excellent one and would be far better for workers than the federal law if it were not for the anti-union, pro-grower Administration of Gov. George Deukmejian.

If the growers’ surprising proposal is adopted by Congress, it would provide California growers an opportunity to persuade the state Legislature to bring California under the federal law.

That move would eliminate California’s farm labor law, which allows secondary boycotts and permits substantial penalties against growers who play anti-union games with the law. The penalties are seldom imposed, however, under Deukmejian.

Bringing farm workers under NLRA also could help growers in Midwestern states such as Ohio and Michigan, where FLOC seems to be gaining some strength and may get a nice boost soon when it merges with Chavez’s UFW.

Growers in those states would be able to ask their legislatures to opt for the federal labor law and avert enactment of a good-for-workers farm labor law like California’s.

The grower federation decision to seek protection under federal labor law will be strongly opposed by unions and might fail to win congressional approval, at least in the immediate future.

But the growers’ move indicates that perhaps they are not as contemptuous of the potential strength of agricultural unions as they say, even though the unions are still weak 25 years after Chavez began his crusade to help improve the plight of America’s impoverished farm workers.