Nut crackers

Ann Hurlbut drove up from Sacramento last Friday afternoon (July 21) to stand on a Chico sidewalk in 108-degree heat for one reason only: She wants a union in the plant where she works, Blue Diamond Growers’ Sacramento almond processing facility.

She came to Chico because the chairman of the board of Blue Diamond, Howard Isom, owner of the big Matsom & Isom accountancy firm here, also chairs the board of directors of the new Golden Valley Bank. That’s why the yellow-shirted demonstrators set up shop just outside the bank’s new offices on Cohasset Road.

Hurlbut is not a young woman. She’s been working for Blue Diamond for 28 years and still makes the wage paid every other sorter there, $11 an hour. It’s seasonal work, starting in September, when the almond harvest begins, and lasting through June. Most of the plant’s 600 workers are seasonal sorters and packers, she said.

Benefits aren’t so hot, either. Last year sorters had to work 1,500 hours, or nearly 40 weeks, before they got either health insurance or paid time off, which meant that they’d qualify just as they were being laid off. And workers are shelling out far more of the cost of health insurance than they did before.

In early 2005, however, the International Longshore and Warehouse Union began organizing in the plant, Augustin Ramirez, a union organizer, said. Two things happened as a result: The company got tough on people it thought supported the union, and it also began improving conditions slightly. Sorters’ pay, then $10.25 an hour, was hiked 75 cents, and the qualification period for benefits was reduced to 500 hours, effective September 2006.

In June 2005, the union filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board, charging the company with multiple violations of labor law.

Following a four-day hearing in December 2005, administrative law judge Jay R. Pollack ruled that Blue Diamond had used intimidation and fear tactics against union sympathizers by threatening them with loss of wages, benefits and pensions if they supported the union. BDG also had threatened to close the plant if a union came in, coercively interrogated employees about their union activities and sympathies, and wrongly fired two employees and threatened to fire another “to discourage union activities and union membership.” The judge ordered the company to cease and desist, reinstate the fired workers and post a notice advising workers of their right to organize.

What the union wants now is an agreement with Blue Diamond that would allow its organizers to enter the shop freely and talk with workers on their breaks. In conjunction, it wants a card-check system for tallying union support. Under such a system, if the ILWU collected signed cards from more than half the workers, the union would be in.

At this point, the union doesn’t trust the company to hold an election. “We can’t have fair elections in a climate of fear, which still exists,” Ramirez explained.

Howard Isom did not return a phone message, but Doug Youngdahl, president and CEO of Blue Diamond, was happy to respond to the union’s charges.

“Blue Diamond believes every person should have the right to vote openly, freely and behind the curtain,” Youngdahl said. “It’s the American way.” A card-check vote would allow the union to pressure workers, he suggested.

As to the labor complaint, “We disagree with the NLRB’s findings,” Youngdahl said. “We think our environment is open and employees are free to make their own decisions.”

Blue Diamond workers have an average tenure of more than 28 years, he said, and the company has had “an exceedingly positive work environment for 96 years that will continue in the future.”

Wages range from $11 to $28 an hour, depending on the position, he said, and are adjusted every year “so they are competitive in the industry depending on what’s happening in the market.”

Yes, Blue Diamond’s mostly seasonal workers have stayed with the company, Ramirez said. That’s because the September-to-June schedule allows women to be home with their children in the summer. But the pay is still inadequate. The only workers making the higher wages are specialists such as mechanics and electricians and supervisors; most employees make the sorter and packer wage, $11, he said.

And it doesn’t matter how long one has been employed: Wages are based on job classification, not years served.

The union’s tactic right now is to put pressure on the company in every way possible, Ramirez said—thus the Chico demonstration. In a quest for foreign allies (Blue Diamond exports much of its product), it recently sent representatives to Korea, which buys a lot of Blue Diamond nuts, and this week a delegation left for Japan, another big purchaser. In recent days it demonstrated at a school board meeting in Atwater (a BDG board members sits on the school board) and a meeting of the California Almond Board in Modesto. And it’s working with local and state politicians, other unions in this country and elsewhere—anyone who might help.

“Our strategy is to be everywhere they turn,” he said—even a hot street corner in Chico.