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Allandale Farm says it will recognize retail-worker union without a vote, let alone expensive anti-union lawyers and consultants

Allandale Farm, the last remaining traditional farm in Boston and Brookline, announced today that it will recognize Allandale Workers United - which only began to try to organize employees at the farm's stand less than three weeks ago:

We look forward to working together with the Union as we continue to provide excellent jobs on the farm, offer great service and products to our customers, and to cultivate sustaining relationships in the community.

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Comments

I love land trusts. We need more of them. Every time I stop and say hi to the bovine, I love seeing that sign posted by the trust.

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.

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What gigantic turds the owners of City Feed are.

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We bought four pumpkins there this evening.

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Because now they will be four times the price due to the union. The farm will be out of business in a few years. Congrats!

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You don't know anything about the economics of unions, I guess. No, their pumpkins will not increase 400% in price. Stop & Shop is unionized and yet, amazingly, their pumpkins don't cost four times as much as the ones at Home Depot

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…imagine the price of your cotton shirt if we pay the slaves!

Get tf outta here with that uninformed propaganda. Even if wages went up 4x (which, come on), cost of labor is only one input for the business as a whole. Just because one input increases by x% doesn’t mean the final product goes up by that same x%. It doesn’t take an MBA to understand that.

God forbid the pumpkin pickers can afford rent and the groceries that their farm sells.

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Now they are comparing slavery to unions. Slaves did not have the opportunity to educate themselves and move on to a higher paying job which is exactly what folks can do if they think they are not being compensated fairly. Including those that work at a small farm.

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Reading comprehension is clearly not your strong suit

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...the farm would be understaffed, and Username would whine "nObOdY WaNtS To wOrK AnYmOrE!"

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Unless labor is 100% of a pumpkin's cost of goods sold, there is no possible way that any increase in the farm's labor budget would double (let alone quadruple!) the cost of a pumpkin. That isn't commie logic; any rock-ribbed Republican economist or business owner would tell you the same thing.

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Well no, labor isn't 100% of course.

But just imagine if the retail employees unionize, and the farm employees unionize, and the seeds unionize, and the water unionizes, and the soil unionizes, and there isn't any sun left because solar panels used it all the sunlight unionizes. Suddenly, all of these people, plant life, and natural resources demand $600 per hour, and the companies have to pay it, because unions are dictators, as has been explained upthread by clearly learnèd individuals.

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Congrats. Now your pumpkin will cost the price of a Porche.

This is the future libs on Beacon Hill want. Unless it’s Karen Spilka. She would not recognize the seed union.

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Seed has had nothing to do with whether unions are recognized in this state for quite some time.

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Sunlight cannot unionize, because "sunlight" is a partitive noun; you can have some sunlight, but not a sunlight. Photons, on the other hand, could unionize. And you know what you get when photons get organized? Lasers, that's what you get. You can see where this is going.

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I'm running for Superintendent of Intergalactic solar power coordination during the midterms and I approve this message. We got lasers ya'll, and you thought the solar storms were going to be bad. ;)

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To the best I can tell, the union doesn't represent agricultural workers. From the Allandale Workers United facebook page...

"Hi! We are Allandale Workers United, a group of retail workers..."

"As workers in the farmstand and garden center..."

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To the best of my knowledge, these are pumpkin shelf-stockers and pumpkin checker-outers and maybe even pumpkin-load-in-SUVers... but I don't think they are pumpkin pickers.

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...was alliterative, so I went with it.

The point remains irrespective of the craft petitioning for a union.

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but it seems to me that, in the context of Boston metro, there's a relevant difference between predominantly white, more well-educated cashiers unionizing and overwhelmingly Latino, typically less well-educated agricultural workers unionizing.

The latter is more likely to get injured and less likely to be able to work once injured, and has far fewer employment options outside of agriculture.

I'm glad that the cashiers have unionized, but I do think it's important to point out that the laborers most likely to be marginalized remain without a union.

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...predominantly white, more well-educated cashiers...

You know this to be the case?
Also, given the farmowners' response to this unionization effort, who's to say they would not respond in like fashion to a field workers' union initiative?

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when your prediction fails to become reality?

You can make any prediction you'd like and those who agree with you will do so, and if proven true then you all can pat yourselves on the back, but if you end up being wrong, you've gotten to make a statement, gotten support from others for it but you will be wrong and yet your statement will stand here forever, without retraction.

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Clientele has cash flow.

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Tell us that you don't know history without telling us you don't know history.

Please promise that you won't buy or use any bit of infrastructure, good, or service tainted by union labor.

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I'm suspicious that there may be actual human beings running that farm. The corporate bots are not going to like this

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A union agreement was made in a short period of time at Allendale Farm. Kudos to all who made this happen. Everyone wants better pay and working conditions.

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Some irony that the places that most need unionization are probably *not* the ones where ownership permits it. (Probably vice versa as well...)

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the rumor at my workplace is that the owners will shut it down rather than accept a union. And they carefully treat us almost as well as they would if we had one.

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is that this is an indication of some kind of communication dysfunction, rather than management being immoral (as is usually the case in union drives). I heard rumors of something like that being the case with Diesel.

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If your company wants to advertise itself as serving the community, and responsible in terms of the environment and labor rights this is what you should be doing, not hiring union busting law firms and refusing to even negotiate with the union.

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