Elected representatives are about to seize farmers’ hard-earned money to use it against the farmers’ own best interests with the pending signature of California’s SB-25 Bill. The bill has pushed its way into the House and Senate and is awaiting signature by Governor Jerry Brown.

SB 25 would allow the United Farm Workers (UFW) to force an employer into mandatory mediation at any time. The California Agricultural Labor Relations Board  (ALRB) could impose wages, terms and conditions of employment on the farm workers and the companies that employ them.

The terms of an agreement would be decided by a single arbitrator/mediator, who would meet with the employer and the union separately, and draft the contract. Workers would have no say in what happens to them. This bill would speed up the process for a mediation decision with a collective bargaining agreement to become binding, which would severely limit any employers’ due process rights to appeal a mediator’s order to a court.

SB-25 amounts to an assault on some of the very principles that the United States was founded upon -- democracyand the right of the people to vote, associate, and speak freely.

This bill puts the freedom of many farm workers in jeopardy because they would have no ability to escape the clutches of a union and would be forced to pay union dues. Union dues often go to causes that the union may support but its members do not. Thousands of workers could end up jobless because of these expensive fees and the necessity to hire fewer workers.

While Americans believe that people should be able to govern themselves, California unions believe that they should govern other Americans. People don’t need a labor union to “protect” them. Especially when that protection is nothing but state-sanctioned robbery.