A Cry for Civil Liberties

Posted by Margaret Mire on Wednesday, January 21st, 2015 at 3:08 pm - Permalink

Silvia Lopez’s Open Letter to Governor Brown

Silvia Lopez, veteran of Fresno-based Gerawan Farming and leader of anti-union movement, wrote an open letter to Governor Jerry Brown in the FlashReport on January 21, 2015.  In her letter, Silvia encourages Governor Brown to help the Gerawan farmworkers secure their civil liberties by asking his Agricultural Labor Relations Board (ALRB) to acknowledge the farmworkers’ votes to decertify the United Farm Workers (UFW) from their workplace:

“We learned the only way to get out of this UFW contract was to collect enough signatures to have a decertification election. We did that — twice. Your labor board, the ALRB, at last let us have an election, and in November 2013 we voted.

Fourteen months later, the board still has not counted those ballots….

How can an agency of your government be allowed to disenfranchise us like this? All we want is our votes to be counted. All we want is our voices to be heard.”

To read the entire letter, click here.