Western Growers President and CEO Tom Nassif made the following statements about Governor Jerry Brown’s veto of SB 25 and approval of AB 1897:
“Governor Brown made a sound decision in vetoing SB 25. We are grateful that he saw the fundamental unfairness of this proposal. When a state mediator imposes a union contract on an employer, as the Agricultural Labor Relations Act provides, the employer has very limited opportunity to obtain a stay of its provisions from the court pending an appeal. This legislation would have raised the barrier so high that it would be practically impossible for any employer to ever obtain a stay. This is fundamentally unfair. By further removing the courts from the process, SB 25 sought to diminish the already limited accountability of the state mediator and the ALRB, and in so doing would have provided even more motivation to the union to run out the clock in good faith bargaining in order to get to Mandatory Mediation and Conciliation (MMC), more properly known as mandatory mediation and binding arbitration.
We thank Governor Brown for making another difficult, but wise decision in this area.”
Western Growers President and CEO Tom Nassif also issued this statement following the governor’s signing of AB 1897:
“We are very disappointed in the governor’s decision to approve AB 1897. This labor union- sponsored bill will unfairly impose significant liability onto an innocent third-party employer for violations of wage and other obligations of a labor contractor even though the third-party employer does not control the contractor. All employers should be ensuring a safe work environment, the payment of wages, and workers’ compensation for their employees, and California has in recent years strengthened these laws and increased enforcement to focus on bad actors. Creating liability for innocent third-party employers is unnecessary and harmful to our state’s job climate.”
