When Manuel Gonzalez, a farmworker for round 20 years, tried to vote in a union election at his final firm, he mentioned he was let go after his employer found that he was organizing.
Gonzalez, 45, mentioned he fears that if he votes at his new office — a farm, headquartered in Gilroy, that produces vegatables and fruits — he may lose his job or face different reprisals, placing him, his spouse and sons in financial hardship.
On Thursday— the birthday of civil rights activist Cesar Chavez, on the downtown San Jose plaza that bears the labor champion’s title — Gonzalez spoke of his worry that talking out as a employee may once more value him his job.
“If I vote in entrance of the supervisor, I’m positive that they’re going to retaliate towards me,” he mentioned in Spanish, by a translator. “We want to have the identical system because the politicians in California, like final yr, when Gov. Gavin Newsom confronted the recall and folks voted by way of mail. We’re asking for the very same factor.”
Gonzalez was one in all greater than a dozen farmworkers who gathered to demand assist for the Agricultural Labor Relations Voting Selection Act, AB2183. If handed, the laws would offer extra alternatives for a way agricultural employees can vote of their union elections. Farmworkers in 13 California cities, from Los Angeles to San Francisco, protested Thursday to name on Newsom to assist the invoice.
In August, farmworkers are planning to march from Delano to Sacramento, retracing the route that Chavez and agricultural employees took in 1966, once they marched to the state capital to demand authorized rights for farmworkers. The march is timed for concerning the time the invoice would land on Newsom’s desk for his signature.
United Farm Staff, or UFW, was based in 1962 by Chavez, Dolores Huerta and different leaders within the farmworkers motion and attracted nationwide consideration by a boycott of grapes that started within the Sixties. Activists pushed then-Gov. Jerry Brown to signal the California Agricultural Labor Relations Act in 1975, establishing the suitable of agricultural employees to hitch and choose unions for collective bargaining.
UFW presently has about 10,000 members throughout California, Washington and Oregon, in line with UFW spokesperson Marc Grossman. Though it’s exhausting to pin down what number of farmworkers there are within the Golden State, Grossman estimated that the quantity stood at about 400,000.
A primary iteration of the Agricultural Labor Relations Voting Selection Act was handed final yr within the Senate and the Meeting however was in the end vetoed by Newsom in September. A more recent model of the laws, AB2183, was launched within the Meeting in February.
“We requested to satisfy with Newsom immediately, on Cesar Chavez Day, and he declined. He didn’t provide totally different assembly days or something,” mentioned UFW Director of Strategic Campaigns Elizabeth Strater. “Cesar Chavez Day isn’t only a historical past lesson, it’s giving farmworkers entry to justice and equity at work.”
Newsom’s workplace mentioned in a press release that “The Governor has dedicated to assembly with UFW representatives and appears ahead to participating in a significant dialogue to uplift our farmworker neighborhood” and mentioned the union’s assembly provide was on a day the governor was out of state along with his household.
Farmworkers can expertise exploitation, wage theft and retaliation from their employers, particularly in the event that they’re making an attempt to unionize, in line with Strater.
“Farm employers have a number of management over what farmworkers do,” she mentioned. “They’re not solely working on the worksite, however they could be residing in housing supplied for by the employer or transported in automobiles owned by the employer. When you've gotten this stage of management over somebody’s life, it’s clearly a really intimidating factor to take part in a union marketing campaign and say we would like a shot at controlling a few of our lives ourselves.”
Efren Frede, who was a farmworker for almost 50 years and retired final yr, mentioned he was attending the demonstration to verify the brand new technology of agricultural employees doesn’t must endure the identical office abuse he did.
“Once I went to vote at my office to kind a union, we have been carrying union pins,” he mentioned. “When my supervisor noticed the pins, we have been harassed, pressured to work quicker and requested to extend the usual of manufacturing, even when we couldn’t do it.”
Serena Alvarez, lawyer and government director of the Salvador E. Alvarez Institute for Non-Violence, is the granddaughter of migrant farmworkers and attended the protest in San Jose in a present of solidarity.
“My grandmother gave delivery to my father and his siblings within the discipline. That’s a part of my household’s historical past,” she mentioned. “Farmworkers are usually not invisible. Folks drive up and down the Valley daily shopping for produce and we will’t neglect the place that comes from.”
UFW Legislative and Political Director Giev Kashkooli addressed a few of the criticisms of the invoice, together with the declare that it could undermine the key poll election course of or act as a “card test” invoice. A card test is the supply that permits employees to skip a secret poll election by having a majority of employees signal playing cards expressing an curiosity in forming a union.
“That’s disinformation on each of these claims,” he mentioned. “The invoice is modeled after the California Voter’s Selection Act. This invoice permits individuals to vote from their house or at work in the event that they’d like. If employees select to make use of the poll card course of, the poll nonetheless must be signed and in the event that they get assist filling out the poll, that particular person must signal it, too. Then it goes right into a sealed envelope, which additionally must be signed. That’s precisely how the California Voter’s Selection Act works.”