William B. Gould IV, head of the California Agricultural Labor Relations Board, submitted his resignation letter recently. The board is tasked with overseeing the Agricultural Labor Relations Act of 1975, which was designed to protect farm-workers from abuse and allow them to organize. Now, however, Gould writes that organized labor for those agricultural employees has eroded over the past four decades so that less than one percent of those workers are currently represented by unions. As a result, there was only one petition filed for representation during his three years chairing the board. Gould remarked that the decrease in union activity could be because farm wages are higher than ever before, but also due to the fact that much of the agricultural workforce in California is undocumented.
See "California Today: The Collapse of Organized Farm Labor", Mike McPhate, The New York Times, February 2, 2017