Fruit Pickers Vote in Runoff Election

Hundreds of Oxnard-area strawberry pickers returned to the ballot box Thursday in the first day of a runoff election to decide whether the United Farm Workers union or a rival committee will represent workers at the nation’s largest strawberry grower.

Officials with the Agricultural Labor Relations Board, the state agency that oversees union elections, reported that voting went smoothly at local fields farmed by the Coastal Berry Co. About 650 Oxnard workers were eligible to vote.

The election shifts today to Watsonville and Salinas, where about 800 Coastal Berry workers are eligible to cast ballots. The ballots are to be counted tonight at Watsonville City Hall.

“Things are going very well, there has been very good voter turnout,” said Fred Capuyan, the labor board’s regional director in Salinas. “We’re looking for more of the same” today.

The runoff comes a week after the UFW and the Coastal Berry of California Farmworkers Committee squared off in an election to represent pickers at the company, which farms about 1,200 acres of strawberries, raspberries and blackberries in Monterey, Santa Cruz and Ventura counties.

The committee fell five votes short of the simple majority needed to win that election, taking 670 of the ballots cast. The UFW got 589 votes, while 83 workers voted for “no union.”

Six votes remained in dispute, but representatives of the UFW and the committee agreed to a runoff, since neither side appeared likely to win a majority of the ballots cast otherwise.

Because the “no union” option does not exist this time, the group that gets the most votes will win.

The Coastal Berry election is the cornerstone of the UFW’s three-year campaign to organize the state’s 20,000 strawberry workers. As such, UFW officials were out in force Thursday to ensure that there were no irregularities at the polls.

UFW co-founder Dolores Huerta said she worried that some workers might have been intimidated by the presence of security guards hired by the company to patrol the fields and help keep the peace.

Otherwise, she said she was optimistic about the UFW’s chances.

“You know it’s going to be close,” she said. “But there was real excitement in the air this morning as workers went to vote.”