Governor Brown Vetoes Card Check Legislation

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Senate Bill 104 (Steinberg), which would have eliminated an agricultural employee’s right to cast an independent vote in a secret ballot election regarding whether to unionize, was vetoed by Gov. Brown on June 28, 2011.

Opponents of Senate Bill 104, argued that the current provisions of the Agricultural Labor Relations Act (ALRA) adequately protect the rights and interests of employees and employers, as well as unions. Modeled on the National Labor Relations Act, the ALRA affords agricultural employees the opportunity to select—or to refrain from selecting—a particular union as their collective bargaining representative through a formal and secure secret ballot election. Each employee votes in a private booth, without any pressure or coercion from the employer, union or co-employees. In this way, the employees’ true and current preferences on unionization are reliably determined.

Senate Bill 104, however, would have allowed unions to bypass secret ballot elections under an alternative "majority signup" procedure. Under Senate Bill 104, a union could have been installed as a bargaining unit’s representative merely by submitting a petition to the Agricultural Labor Relations Board (ALRB) along with representation cards signed by a majority of the affected employees and designating that union for that purpose.

Equally concerning to the opposition was the fact that the "majority signup" process proposed to designate a particular union would not have also been allowed to decertify a union. Although Senate Bill 104 would have eliminated an employee’s right to a secret ballot election to ease the way for a union to be installed, employees would still have been required to vote in a secret ballot election to decertify and remove a union. The law should not favor labor organizations by making the process for employees to remove a union from their workplace more difficult than the process to put a union in place.

Finally, Senate Bill 104 would have created a huge disparity in the remedies provided for unfair labor practices committed by an employer versus unfair labor practices committed by a union. Under Senate Bill 104, if an employer was charged with interfering, coercing, or discriminating against an employee through the exercise of his/her rights to unionize, the charge would have been elevated to a priority level and taken precedence over any other case filed in that ALRB office. Thereafter, if the employer was found by the ALRB to have committed an unfair labor practice, the ALRB could have issued a statutory civil penalty against the employer in an amount of up to $20,000 per violation. No such comparable treatment or penalty was provided in Senate Bill 104 for a union charged with and found to have committed an unfair labor practice.

In Gov. Brown’s veto message, he stated, "I am not yet convinced that the far reaching proposals of this bill – which alter in a significant way the guiding assumptions of the ALRA—are justified."

The governor’s full veto message can be accessed here.

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