A proposal for agricultural cannabis workers, now state law, has raised questions in Olympia about what’s best for all farmworkers. But why isn’t anyone asking the first and most important question?

Should agricultural cannabis workers be able to collectively bargain with their employers? That was the question this spring for the Washington state legislature, and their answer was ‘yes.’ Governor Bob Ferguson signed the measure on April 22.

The proposal, now state law, brought another question: is this measure simply a first step toward unionization and collective bargaining for all farmworkers in the state? While direct supporters of the bill, HB 1141, denied this was the endgame, some proponents have suggested that widespread farmworker unionization was indeed the longer-term goal.

Farming community advocates repeatedly asked about the measure’s true intent and expressed concerns publicly, both in hearings on the bill and in media coverage of the process. This sparked angry pushback from its supporters, including one particularly testy retort from sponsor Rep. Lillian Ortiz-Self when fellow House Labor Committee member Rep. Alex Ybarra raised concerns in a January meeting.

“It’s taking up the fight,” said Ortiz-Self in the hearing, “it’s a much larger fight that I think the state should look at being involved in.”

“They want to unionize all farmworkers,” Ybarra said in an interview following the hearing. “This is just step one.”

But despite all of the back-and-forth, the most important question remains unanswered: is this particular collective bargaining plan actually good for farmworkers, whether they’re in cannabis, apples, dairy or blueberries?

Not your grandfather’s type of unionization

This is where the truth becomes inconvenient for the effort’s backers. First, the collective bargaining system just approved for cannabis workers, and ostensibly intended for all Washington farmworkers, doesn’t allow workers to choose whether to unionize and collectively bargain via a democratic, secret-ballot vote.

The lack of a free worker vote is alarming, but its replacement is so much more problematic: a fraught system known as “card check.” While it’s not a practice mandated by the National Labor Relations Board, labor activists in California have used it to unionize farmworkers there, leading to horror stories of public intimidation of workers, either for or against unionization.

“There is a history of coercion, on both sides, from the employers’ side and from the union side,” said Mike Gempler, executive director of the Washington Growers League, in the state House Labor Committee hearing in January on the cannabis worker plan. “People need to have a vote on this, and it’s up to the employees as to whether they want to have third-party representation or not.”

How is a process that fails to protect workers’ privacy and thus their freedom of conscience, leaving them vulnerable to bullying, a step forward for labor rights? Suddenly each worker feels they’re in the crosshairs of both their employer and unionizers in the midst of what’s typically a hotly-contested decision rife with controversy and conflict, not just in the workplace but also the surrounding community.

“We’ve got to protect the rights of people… People need to have the right to have freedom of conscience, and not be subject to coercion,” said Scott Dilley, public affairs director at the Lacey-based Worker and Farmer Labor Association (WAFLA).

“That is one of the concerns that we have with this legislation,” Dilley said. “It has to do with the method of doing this, where you’re establishing a state process that is inherently open, and not open in a good way, but open in a way that doesn’t protect the freedom of conscience of the workers… to me that is a very undemocratic process.”

Big pay raise? Think again

Sadly, the troubling questions about this particular brand of unionization don’t end there, though. At the end of the day, workers typically want to know: will this new arrangement result in more money in their pockets?

Although the public would assume the answer to be an easy ‘yes,’ it turns out that the reality is much more murky. In fact, in some cases, farmworkers unionized via this kind of card check system in California have been documented to actually earn less than they would have without the collective bargaining supposedly done on their behalf.

In one such situation in California, on what was at the time the largest stone fruit farm in the world, the United Farmworkers (UFW) union negotiated a pay increase for workers, but also demanded union dues that reduced workers’ take-home pay below what non-union workers were earning.

Who are they actually fighting for?

Workers at that operation, Gerawan Farming, became so fed up with the lack of support from UFW that they voted in 2013 to leave the UFW and its counterproductive collective bargaining, which had been forced on workers for decades. The UFW responded by fighting back–against the very workers it claimed to represent–and leveraged the money and political capital it had gained on the backs of farmworkers to keep their votes from being counted for over 5 years.

The UFW’s actions in the Gerawan Farming case serve to prove the workers’ accusations that the union wasn’t a bona fide representative of their interests, and was more interested in building their own empire than providing real benefits for workers.

Not surprisingly, UFW now represents less than one percent of farmworkers in California. Interestingly, they were one of the loudest voices promoting the agricultural cannabis worker measure here in Washington, and suggesting the bill was a first step in a larger effort to bring California-style, card check unionization and collective bargaining to all farmworkers in the state.

In fact, the union’s critics claim the activist organization is moving further afield in order to find workers who will believe their promises of worker rights and higher pay because they are unaware of the group’s abuses in California.

The root of the problem

But this is more than an indictment of UFW, or any single labor activist organization. Because the truth is that many of the anti-worker actions ironically resulting from farmworker unionization efforts are at their core a result of the deeply-flawed card check system and the lack of transparency and accountability that it enables.

So, is the new collective bargaining process via card check actually good for Washington agricultural cannabis workers? Not necessarily.

Which leaves us with a new question: is “not necessarily” a good enough answer to support forcing such a system on all farmworkers in Washington state?