[from GV Wire: The following is a response sent to GV Wire from lawyers representing Gerawan Farming. They say the amount the Agricultural Labor Relations Board (ALRB) spends litigating the Gerawan cases is much higher than figures indicated in public records act requests and reported in our
initial story.
Gerawan also points out a math error made in our initial story. The amount that ALRB/Department of Justice is spending on five cases responded to via a public records act request against Gerawan is $281,350]
Based on publicly-available budget reports by the ALRB, this agency has spent more than $10 million trying to suppress the right of Gerawan employees to vote. That’s over $4,000 for every worker ballot cast in the November 2013 decertification election.
This not only makes this the most expensive state-sponsored election in California history. It is the most expensive effort to destroy ballots in the history of agricultural labor relations in this state.
You report attorney time expended to date by the California Attorney General in Gerawan-related litigation were AG lawyers are representing the ALRB in court. The amounts you list total to $281,350.00, not $169,788, as you reported. It does not include the time spent by the AG defending the ALRB and its senior officers in whistleblower retaliation and discrimination cases filed against this agency by its own employees. It is an even tinier fraction of tax payer money spent by this agency in Gerawan-related cases over the last five years.
That is “What ALRB is Spending on Gerawan.”
Ronald H. Barsamian
Barsamian & Moody
Attorneys at Law
What are your thoughts? Leave your comments below.
Contact David Taub
Phone: 559-492-4037 / e-mail
This story was not subject to the approval of Granville Homes.
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John Rankin
May 5, 2017 at 12:28 pm
I wonder if David Taub has been on a long vacation out of the country for the last 3+ years… This story has been national since 2013. Fact is, ALRB is stacked with UFW activists, the most egregiously corrupt state agency in California. What Taub missed was the fact that ALRB and UFW are in collusion to deny thousands of farmworkers their legal right to their election result. In the old south, it was called “Jim Crow Laws” – where democrat operatives sought to suppress the Black vote by any means possible. Here in CA, one agricultural company, Gerawan Farming, has been targeted by the ALRB & UFW for the exertion of their own form of Jim Crow. Not only have the farmworkers been denied their rights, but they have been harassed, intimidated, threatened, coerced, stripped of their rights and repeatedly been subjected to legal actions bent on forcing them into a union and union contract they overwhelmingly reject. These actions came from both UFW and ALRB. In fact, UFW even went so far as to physically assault a female Gerawan Farmworker, Silvia Lopez, in October 2013.
In Taubs story, he cites 5 legal cases, but lists only 4, and his math is way off. Beyond the math (which only cites attorney fees), Taub makes no account for the thousands of hours spent by ALRB Staff dedicated to taking down Gerawan and their workers, court costs, state of CA costs in litigation, various County Supervisors, School Districts and City Councils spending time working with UFW to trash Gerawan’s reputation and the money spent by the UFW themselves. If you add that up – ALRB, state of CA, various liberal cities and counties and UFW’s spending, you are probably closer to $25Million being spent to deny thousands of farmworkers their rights under ALRA Law. This is nothing short of armed robbery – attempting to seize 1 1/2 weeks wages from every Gerawan farmworker each year, (or they get fired) and give it to the UFW.
Gerawan’s response is very soft and kind in light of what is blatantly a politically and financially motivated move on the part of ALRB. Bottom line, ALRB needs the UFW to survive, in order for ALRB to justify their own existence. These bureaucrats at ALRB have one goal in mind: self preservation. They lack neutrality, because it does not help their job prospects. So in the eys of ALRB, screw Gerawan Farming, screw ALRA Law, screw the civil rights of not only Gerawan Farmworkers, but every Farmworker in the state of CA. If Gerawan goes down, so does the CA Agriculture for the next couple of generations, if not forever. On the flip side, ALRB would have lots of cases to litigate as UFW would be filing bogus complaints by the thousands, at taxpayer expense…