Sacramento Bee
July 22, 2001
By Andy Furillo

The Dole Food Co.'s unexpected layoffs of 1,900 workers in the southern San Joaquin Valley again has put a focus on the firm's labor relations record.

In the past decade, it has paid out more than $1 million in two lawsuits filed by workers in California who accused the company of gender discrimination and of not paying them for their mandatory travel time.

Dole also is the last remaining corporate defendant in a lawsuit filed on behalf of 26,000 banana workers around the world who claimed they were sterilized through exposure to a pesticide. The other defendants paid $52 million to settle the accusations against them.

In addition, the company has acknowledged locking out 120 union workers for more than a decade when their contract ran out at a vegetable cooling plant in Salinas, and it successfully fought off another lawsuit filed in 1994 by 400 Ventura County strawberry workers who charged that they were let go after voting to unionize.

Dole is headed by David H. Murdock, a longtime Republican Party financier who has been chairman and chief executive officer of the company since his Flexi-Van Corp. acquired the company in 1985. Murdock declined to be interviewed for this story.

Company officials declined to discuss in detail the two lawsuits that resulted in payouts of $530,000 and $550,000 with company employees, according to court records and plaintiffs' attorneys.

The first was filed in Los Angeles federal court in 1993 by female citrus packers at Dole subsidiaries in Tulare and Ventura counties. The company settled the case in which the employees charged they were denied more stable general labor jobs because of their gender.

The second suit was filed in Monterey County in the mid-1990s by employees of Royal Packing Inc., another Dole subsidiary. The company did not pay field laborers at their Salinas job site for the time it took them to get to work, even though the terms of their employment required them to ride to work in company vehicles. The workers won on a state Supreme Court appeal last year.

The sterilization of 26,000 banana workers through the use of 1,2-dibromo-3-chloropropane (DBCP) gained international attention in the 1980s. Attorneys in the Texas class-action suit charged that Dole continued to use the pesticide for seven years after it was banned in the United States.

Duane Miller, a Sacramento attorney and DBCP expert who assisted the plaintiffs in the case, said in an interview that Dole bore no less responsibility than the other corporate defendants that paid $52 million to settle with the plaintiffs.

"After there was virtually indisputable evidence that DBCP had sterilized men in every plant it had been manufactured or formulated in in the United States, and after the product was banned, Dole decided to use this product without telling their workers or providing them any more protection than is afforded by a T-shirt," Miller said.

Dole officials declined to discuss the case. It is pending in the U.S. 5th District Court of Appeals in Texas. Dole is fighting on the issue of whether the plaintiffs had the right to bring the action in the United States.

Company Vice President George R. Horne, however, said, "I can unequivocally state that Dole has never and does not use pesticides that are illegal in the United States, the European Union or the World Health Organization."

As for the lockout that has prevented union cooler workers from entering the Dole-owned Bud Antle of California, Danny O. Urbano, vice president in charge of industrial relations for the firm's fresh vegetables division, said the employees could return to their jobs tomorrow if they signed an agreement accepting the company's pay offer. The locked-out employees have balked, however, because the agreement would require them to make $5 to $8 an hour less than their replacement workers, according to officials with the United Food and Commercial Workers union.

The Ventura County strawberry workers at Dole's Oceanview Farms sued the company in July 1994 when they were laid off shortly after voting to join the United Farm Workers union. Dole officials said Oceanview's strawberry operations were losing money and the layoffs had nothing to do with the employees' vote for United Farm Workers representation. The company prevailed against the workers in court.

The Bee's Andy Furillo can be reached at (916) 321-1141 or afurillo@sacbee.com