Workers’ Struggle at Blue Diamond Shows Need for Employee Free Choice
Last year, workers sought a union at Blue Diamond, a nut processing company, hoping to redress unfair pay, unsafe conditions and mistreatment of sorters and packers. But in large part due to a vicious anti-union campaign by management, the workers lost their election and could not form a union.
A judge ruled an election under such circumstances is valid—and acknowledged that Blue Diamond took part in a broad array of unfair conduct against workers.
The fact that Blue Diamond’s wrongdoing went unpunished, denying workers a fair choice, is a sign that our labor laws are broken, says Kimberly Freeman, acting executive director of American Rights at Work, and is evidence America’s workers need the Employee Free Choice Act to prevent the unfair conduct by corporations that is all too common today.
In a letter to the Sacramento Bee, Freeman says the case shows the effects of unfair labor laws that allow corporations to intimidate employees seeking a voice on the job:
It’s no surprise that in the face of aggressive anti-union tactics, Blue Diamond’s employees lost in a system that was tilted to favor management from the beginning.
Here’s Why We Need Employee Free Choice
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Marcy Rein, a retired member of Office and Professional Employees (OPEIU) Local 29 who worked in the ILWU Organizing Department for most of the Blue Diamond campaign, describes how the Blue Diamond workers’ years-long effort to gain a union recently ended with a loss. Rein also vividly describes how that experience demonstrates yet again why we need passage of the Employee Free Choice Act.
For four years, the workers on the Organizing Committee at the Blue Diamond Growers (BDG) plant in Sacramento, Calif., had done everything they could to avoid being where they were on the night of Nov. 19. They campaigned hard for a free and fair choice on whether to join the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU). But there they were watching the vote count at the end of an election supervised by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) run under the same old broken rules.
They stood around in the huge bare room where the election had taken place, in a cold storage building that doubles as the site of the annual Thanksgiving turkey giveaway. Sounds bounced off the concrete floor and disappeared on the way to the 40-foot ceiling—sighs, a stray cell phone quickly squelched, a hiccup of distress.
