New Orleans Reading a recent issue of In These Times, I was encouraged and fascinated by a report of organizing progress by the United Farm Workers (UFW) in building unions in upstate New York. The UFW has long been well-known for the leadership of Cesar Chavez and its up and down history of work in California. To read that they had won eight elections and union certifications at farms in New York since 2022 when the state enacted a more comprehensive agricultural labor law providing a process was exciting.
Like all union organizing, none of this is easy, and organizers would credibly argue unionizing in the fields and orchards is a higher degree of difficulty. Besides the problem of access and employer opposition, aggressive immigration enforcement and the prevalence of special H-2A visas for seasonal workers with fewer rights and less protection, also are huge obstacles. Nonetheless, they have signed a couple of contracts and one with Cahoon Farms is
…the UFW’s first in the entire Northeast. The contract, which covers both Cahoon’s seasonal H-2A workers and its local, year-round workforce, includes some modest wage increases, and, more importantly to the workers…it aims to protect them against being treated as disposable. Specifically, the contract requires the farm to provide sick and injured workers with sick leave and workers’ compensation, establishes an employer-matched retirement fund and bars the farm from arbitrarily replacing workers.
A line in the article that New York was now one of three states with a working system for farmworkers to gain union representation caught my eye. California was certainly one of the three, but what was the third? The article didn’t say, so it was off to the internet for more surprises. I’m guess Hawaii where there is extensive unionization with the ILWU, but I could be wrong.
A report from Connecticut said there were many, though not necessarily with an NLRB-like procedure.
Ten states statutorily allow agricultural employees to collectively bargain for employment conditions (Arizona, California, Idaho, Kansas, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Nebraska, Maine, Oregon, and Wisconsin). In addition, New Jersey’s Supreme Court has interpreted a state constitutional provision that grants private sector employees the right to enter collective bargaining agreements as covering agricultural workers.
Another report raised the number that “allowed collective bargaining” to fourteen adding Hawaii, and Washington.
Florida is an area where that has been extensive organization and real success winning agreements with buyers of tomatoes, and the law there is interesting:
The right of persons to work shall not be denied or abridged on account of membership or non-membership in any labor union or labor organization. The right of employees, by and through a labor organization, to bargain collectively shall not be denied or abridged. Public employees shall not have the right to strike.[36] Florida law also provides that employees have the right to join and form labor unions, which agricultural workers are not exempt from.[37]
The situation in so-called right-to-work states, like Florida and so many others now, opens some doors, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy to find a key. Ohio has been a source of a lot of farmworker agitation, but it seems not to come up on any of these lists.
The organizing situation for farmworkers is certainly broadening. The New York is worth following, because there could be breakthroughs that set a different standard. Most on this list gives lip service to worker rights and collective bargaining, but not a path to get there or any enforcement to make the rights real. That still leaves 2.5 million farmworkers and many visa holders at rock bottom in terms of real prospects for achieving real protections and union representation.