In the first scenario, when propanil is no longer applied in the buffer zones and no other herbicide is used to replace it, we found that total revenues in Butte and Colusa counties would decline by $1.68 million, and that net revenues would decline by $1.58 million, assuming that the price of rice does not increase in response to the 0.4% decrease in production . In the second scenario, with lambda-cyhalothrin ground-applied before planting instead of being aerially applied, and assuming 15% and 23% yield losses as explained above, we found that total revenues in Butte and Colusa would decline by $5.75 million, while net revenues would decline by $4.66 million. Again, this assumes that the price of rice does not change in response to the reduction in quantity of rice produced. The combined revenue losses of the draft regulations, due to changes in application of both propanil and lambda-cyhalothrin, would be a $7.43 million loss in total revenues and a $6.25 million loss in net revenues for Butte and Colusa counties. Our analysis indicates that the draft regulations will likely have a substantial negative impact on California rice growers in Butte and Colusa counties, with a decrease in total revenues of $7.4 million and a decrease in net revenues of $6.2 million, if rice prices do not shift because of the decreases in production. The results change substantially if price is allowed to increase in response to a reduction in quantity of rice in California. However,10 liter drainage collection pot this is not a very realistic scenario given that rice prices are greatly influenced by world market prices, California only accounts for about one-fifth of U.S. rice production, and the United States is active in the international rice market.
The magnitude of the predicted revenue losses can be accounted for by the fact that there are no ideal substitutes for propanil and lamda-cyhalothrin, the large expected yield losses due to weed and rice water weevil damage in untreated buffer areas, and a sizable amount of rice acreage is affected by the draft regulations. The price of the alternative treatment in comparison to the current treatment is unlikely to be a major factor because farmers will most likely leave buffers untreated with herbicide and switch to ground applications of lamda-cyhalothrin, which involves a negligible increase in per-acre costs. Additionally, because lamda-cyhalothrin also controls tadpole shrimp, another pest of seedling rice, early pest management may become more expensive. Due to the very high share of fields affected, additional management costs due to the regulations, which are not estimated here, could be substantial. Even if the additional management costs under the draft regulations would be only $100 per field, this would lead to additional revenue losses of $470,000.The federal National Labor Relations Act excludes farm workers. California is the only major farm state with a state law that grants union rights to farm workers, establishes election procedures under which workers decide whether they want to be represented by unions, and remedies unfair labor practices committed by employers and unions. The Agricultural Labor Relations Act was enacted in 1975 after a decade of strife, as the fledgling United Farm Workers union challenged farm employers and the Teamsters for the right to represent farm workers. Experience during the late 1960s, with farm employers sometimes selecting the Teamsters to represent their workers without elections, led to provisions in the ALRA. These allowed the Agricultural Labor Relations Board to recognize a union as the bargaining representative of farm workers only after workers vote in secret-ballot elections. After the ALRA went into effect in Fall 1975, there were over 100 elections a month on the state’s farms, and it appeared that many of the state’s farm workers wanted to be represented by unions. Between 1975 and 1977, Figure 1 shows there were almost 700 elections on California farms, and unions were certified to represent workers on two-thirds of the farms involved .
Unions on most large vegetable farms and many of the largest fruit farms were expected to transform the farm labor market by raising wages and obtaining benefits such as health insurance and pensions for the seasonal workers they represented. After pushing entry-level wages in lettuce contracts to twice the minimum wage, Business Week on March 5, 1979 predicted that the United Farm Workers would help seasonal farm workers “to win wage parity with industrial workers.” The UFW became a major force in state politics, and sued the University of California to stop the use of taxpayer funds to support labor-saving mechanization research. Union organizing slowed to an average of 30 elections a year in the 1980s, and the share of elections that resulted in a union being certified to represent workers fell to 55%. Unions or workers can request secret-ballot elections, and during the 1990s requests fell to an average of 10 a year, with unions winning half. In the first decade of the 21st century, the average number of elections fell to seven a year, and many involved workers trying to decertify the union representing them. In some years, the UFW requested no elections to win certification to represent more workers, and was decertified at farms including L.E. Cooke, Vista Vineyard, and Henry Hibino. Over 15 organizations have been certified by the ALRB to represent workers on California farms, but today, three major unions represent most of the farm workers covered by contracts. The best-known union, the UFW, reported 4,300 active members to the U.S. Department of Labor at the end of 2010, and 2,500 active participants in its Juan de la Cruz pension fund; that is, workers on whose behalf employers made pension contributions sometime during the year. Teamsters Local 890 represents several thousand workers employed in the Salinas area, while United Food and Warehouse Workers Local 5 represents workers in the Salinas areas and at several wineries and dairies around the state. The UFW does not have local unions.There are four major explanations for why farm worker unions have been unable to represent more California farm workers and transform the farm labor market. The first involves flawed union leadership, especially of the UFW. Journalist Miriam Pawel praised UFW leader Cesar Chavez as a charismatic leader, able to articulate the hopes and dreams of farm workers, but concluded that Chavez was unwilling to turn the UFW into a business union that negotiated and administered contracts.
Chavez seemed more interested in using the UFW to achieve broader social change than in organizing more farm workers who might challenge his leadership. The second explanation involves state politics. Democratic governors made key appointments to the ALRB between 1975 and 1982, Republicans between 1983 and 1998, Democrats between 1999 and 2004, Republicans between 2005 and 2011, and Democrats since. Sociologists Linda and Theo Majka concluded that the ability of farm worker unions to organize and represent farm workers in the 1970s and early 1980s depended on which political party made appointments to the ALRB. Since then,plastic gutter arguments about political interference with the ALRB have diminished. The third explanation deals with changes in the structure of farm employment. Farm worker unions were most successful in the 1960s and 1970s with farms that belonged to conglomerates with brand names that made them vulnerable to boycotts, including Seven-Up, Shell Oil, and United Brands . During the 1980s, many conglomerates sold their California farming operations to growers who were more likely to hire farm workers via intermediaries such as custom harvesters and farm labor contractors.The fourth explanation is rising unauthorized migration that added to the supply of labor, making it hard for unions to win wage increases. Figure 2 shows that the number of deportable aliens located, mostly foreigners apprehended just inside the MexicoU.S. border, was rising when unions had their maximum impacts on wages. This occurred between the mid-1960s and the late 1980s, after the Bracero program ended and before unauthorized migration increased in the 1980s with recession and peso devaluations in Mexico. By the mid-1980s, when apprehensions rose to almost 1.8 million a year, unions found it hard to organize workers fearful of being discovered by Border Patrol agents. It was also difficult to win wage and benefit increases after they were certified to represent workers because newcomers from Mexico were flooding the labor market.
Farm worker unions acknowledge their difficulty organizing and representing farm workers, and hope for federal and state legislative changes to restore union power. Their primary federal goal is enactment of the Agricultural Jobs, Opportunity, Benefits and Security Act , a compromise negotiated with farm employers that would legalize currently unauthorized farm workers and make employer-friendly changes to the H-2A guest worker program. Unions believe that legal workers grateful to them for legal status would be easier to organize. However, AgJOBS is unlikely to be negotiated soon, prompting the UFW to urge changes to the ALRA. The UFW won an amendment to the ALRA in 2002 that guarantees a union contract within eight months, and another in 2011 that allows the ALRB to intervene after employers unlawfully interfere before a union election. Unions certified to represent farm workers want to negotiate agreements that set wages and benefits and protect the union as an institution by requiring workers to join the union and pay dues. There is no master list of contracts signed between farm employers and unions, preventing analysis on which union certifications failed to result in contracts. However, it is clear that most of the over 800 farms on which unions were certified to represent workers never had a union contract. Furthermore, unions were unable to renew contracts with many of the farms that signed first contracts. Unions tackled the difficulty of turning election victories into contracts with mandatory mediation in 2002, an amendment to the ALRA that should have been unnecessary. The ALRA includes a unique remedy to encourage employers to bargain in good faith with their certified union. If employers fail to bargain in good faith, the ALRB can order the employer to make employees whole for lost wages and benefits during the time that the employer failed to bargain. Unions led by the UFW argued that the make-whole remedy was not effective because of long lags between when an election is held and ALRB certification of the results. Employers often contest the ALRB’s certification decision in the courts and, by the time the employer is ordered to begin good faith bargaining, there may have been significant worker turnover and shifts in union priorities. Meanwhile, separate procedures to determine the amount of make whole owed to workers can take years, frustrating workers who expected wage and benefit increases soon after voting for union representation. Unions argued that such employer behavior discouraged worker interest in the benefits of collective bargaining. The California Legislature agreed, approving an amendment to the ALRA that allowed mandatory mediation if employers and unions are unable to reach a first agreement via good-faith bargaining. Since 2003, employers and their certified unions bargain for at least 180 days to reach a first contract . If they fail, either party can request help from a mediator for an additional 30 days of bargaining. If this mediated effort fails, the mediator can set the terms of an agreement that the ALRB can impose on the parties. Mandatory mediation, which aims to ensure that unions get first contracts quickly, was denounced by growers as a perversion of collective bargaining, whose goal is to allow the parties closest to the workplace to negotiate wages, benefits, and working conditions. Fears that unions would frequently invoke mandatory mediation, to try to gain via mediation what they could not win at the bargaining table, prompted limits on how often it could be invoked; no union could request mediation more than 75 times between 2003 and 2007. This limit proved unnecessary. Mandatory mediation has been invoked seven times in nine years. In two cases, Hess Collection Winery and Boschma and Sons Dairy, a mediator imposed a collective bargaining agreement; in two others, Bayou Dairy and Frank Pinheiro Dairy, the employer went out of business. In Pictsweet, Valley View Farms, and D’Arrigo, the parties reached a collective bargaining agreement during the mediation process.