What’s the antidote to the Growers Cheating Formula? You’re a good friend of farm workers and I know you will help. You pay attention. You’re familiar with how growers destroy unions:
1. When workers ask for fair pay, respect or workplace safety, grower agents tell them they have no rights and they’d better shut up. 2. When the UFW tries to meet with workers, grower agents harass workers and threaten if they listen to the UFW, their jobs are in danger. 3. Growers hold company meetings and force workers to attend. 4. If the union election fails, growers count it as a win, as even if the Agricultural Labor Relations Board (ALRB) invalidates the election and calls for a new one, workers can’t unhear the tons of lies they heard. Actions like this are blatantly illegal. Still, Corralitos Farms and others follow this formula because it works. But thanks to your support things are changing. Workers won a major victory in 2011 when the California legislature passed SB 126, a bill that says that if it is proved before the ALRB that an employer “cheated” to influence the outcome of an election, the election is invalidated and the union is certified. To make this new law effective for workers, such as those at Corralitos Farms, a 360-worker strawberry grower in California’s Monterey county, the UFW must fight in legal proceedings. Will you help us? A key issue for workers at Corralitos is simple: They don’t want to continually risk their safety by picking strawberries in rows that are slick with mud. Bending over to the ground to pick strawberries is difficult work. Between each row is a slick gully of mud. You’re lugging a 9 pound box of strawberries. A supervisor is telling you to hurry up. You’re paid by the box, so you try to hurry. The inevitable result is injury. Refugio Vasquez was injured. “The issue of wet and muddy rows has been a nightmare for me, since I have fallen and hurt myself in the past because of the wet and muddy rows.” Maria Cruz Camacho was afraid. “When I was working in muddy rows I was terrified that I would slip and fall… I knew that I was losing money because I would pick at a lower pace than when the rows were dry since I feared slipping and falling and Corralitos Farms does not provide an option for a medical plan.” So Corralitos workers bravely went on strike last August--and asked the UFW to help. That’s when the harassment by the management and agents of Corralitos began. They threatened UFW organizers. They threatened workers. They called the police. The strike was a success. Corralitos told them they wouldn’t have pick the muddy rows anymore, but the workers weren’t fooled. On September 14, a majority of the workers submitted union authorization cards seeking to be represented by the UFW. That’s when Corralitos took off the gloves. Management held mandatory captive audience meetings. According to workers, management threatened them with job loss if they supported the union. They said that if the UFW won the election, the union would fire them. How the UFW could fire workers when they are employed by Corralitos Farms is unclear. But truth wasn’t the issue. The goal was to scare workers. And it worked. On September 19, five days after a majority of workers said they wanted to be represented by the UFW, the vote to unionize was narrowly defeated. But the story’s not over. We were able to immediately document the ways in which Corralitos lied and cheated. We filed a case with the ALRB to ask that under the new law, the election be invalidated and the union automatically certified. But you know that the lawyers for Corralitos will fight back. Growers want to try to bury this first test of the new anti-cheating law in mud. That’s why we need you to make your donation to help the Corralitos workers win in court. Thank you again. http://action.ufw.org/page/m/3bed9ca5/145687a8/471bd451/2b47e45a/573962523/VEsP/ OUR E-MAIL ADDRESS HAS CHANGED.Please add our new email u...@ufw.org to your safelist/address book so that our messages don’t get trapped in your spam filter. If you have questions about how to do this, drop us an e-mail. Check out our website at: http://action.ufw.org/page/m/3bed9ca5/145687a8/471bd451/2b47e3b6/573962523/VEsHBA/ and keep up with the latest news. Check out the UFW's Social Networking pages. Click to visit our Facebook Fan Page, Facebook Cause, YouTube, Flickr, MySpace,and Care2 pages. Please link to us and become our "Friend" and follow us on Twitter too! If you received this message from a friend, you can sign up for the UFW List Serve. Privacy Policy United Farm Workers, P.O. 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