Six farm workers are waiting to learn whether they and their coworkers’ firing and rehiring were an offer or an ultimatum in the eyes of the state’s high court.
The Supremes heard arguments on last week regarding six former employees of a Sunnyside mushroom farm who say they were effectively forced to surrender their right to sue in court if they wanted to stay on the job.
At the center of the case is Greenwood Mushroom Sunnyside LLC, which bought a facility once run by Windmill Farms (formerly known as Ostrom), and subsequently offered new contracts to employees that included mandatory arbitration provisions, which generally require employment disputes to be resolved outside the courtroom. The new jobs also came with reduced pay, all while presumably continuing to perform the same work at the same mushroom farm.
Attorney Ann Gong, who’s representing the workers, said the employees were in the middle of a union organizing campaign when Greenwood fired them en masse. The workers were handed them their proverbial pink slips in the middle of a workday and given until the end of the following day to ink a new contract.
The farm workers, as she told it, were given something considerably less than a choice. The transition happened to go down in the dead of winter, when farm work hardly grows on trees or, in this case, climate-controlled mushroom houses. This facility offered year-round employment, making the prospect of losing those jobs especially irksome.
Gong argued that the circumstances made the agreements so unfair that the resulting agreement was unenforceable. The workers, she said, had little choice in practical terms.
Peter Wozniak, the attorney representing Greenwood, argued that the workers’ former employer, Ostrom, closed the business before Greenwood could offer them new jobs. The distinction matters, he said, because state law gives employers a wide berth when it comes to conditioning offers of new employment. In other words, Greenwood wasn’t forcing existing employees to accept new conditions. It was offering new jobs to people who had just *ahem* “become unemployed.”
Several justices cocked an eyebrow at whether such corporate formalities should carry that much weight. What would prevent a company from cutting its whole workforce loose and immediately rehiring everyone under contracts containing arbitration requirements?
If the arrangement works as advertised, employers might never have to hash out new contracts with existing employees ever again. They could just switch out the name on the contracts, dub everyone a new hire and start over. The justices also questioned the role of managers who communicated the firings and subsequent employment offers.
Wozniak conceded that he didn’t know which company employed certain managers at the precise moment those messages were delivered.
That uncertainty attracted attention from the bench. If the legal distinction depends on which corporate entity employed the person delivering the news, knowing who signed that person’s paycheck would seem like a high-level detail.
Wozniak held that Ostrom alone had the authority to fire its workers. Greenwood, he said, was responsible for hiring them.
The six workers aren’t the only ones caught in the legal machinery. The United Farm Workers of America is challenging a lower court order that paused its claims while the individual workers’ disputes proceeded through arbitration.
The union argues it never signed an arbitration agreement and should not have to wait for six separate proceedings before pursuing its own claims in superior court. Its attorney told the justices that the organization has independent standing and seeks injunctive relief extending beyond the individual workers.
As if this story needed another wrinkle, the justices also considered whether Instar Asset Management, the money behind Greenwood, can still enforce those deals despite having not signed them.
For those keeping score at home, the case involves employees who allegedly had no real choice but to sign arbitration agreements, a union that never signed one and a company that didn’t sign one but wants to enforce it anyway.
The Supremes will mull over the case for the time being – quite possibly with a new court depending on where the smart money lands.
A version of this story first appeared on the Washington Observer website.
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