It’s time to let feedlot workers vote

Today Americans will decide who they want to lead this country for the next four years.

Voters will make their choice by casting secret ballots.

It seems to us that this method, which we use to fill the most important job in the world, ought to be a reasonable way to determine whether 85 workers at three livestock feedlots want to join a union.

Beef Northwest, the company that owns those feedlots, in Boardman, Nyssa and Quincy, Wash., agrees.

So do the 120 ranchers, including 16 in Baker County, who belong to Country Natural Beef, the cooperative that sends its cattle to the Boardman feedlot for finishing.

Beef Northwest officials have agreed to honor the results of elections scheduled for Nov. 7-9 at the feedlots.

Last week Country Natural Beef ranchers met with feedlot workers to announce the elections and explain how they will be conducted.

Employees will have the chance to cast secret ballots on the question of whether they want to be represented by United Farm Workers.

We hope this election ends the months-long controversy over the issue, which also has embroiled Whole Foods Markets, the chain that is the largest buyer of Country Natural Beef.

But we’re not confident.

Andrea Cano, a spokesperson for Oregon Farmer Worker Ministries, alleged last week that Beef Northwest has “spent the last four months escalating divisive anti-union sentiment” among its feedlot workers.

Cano contends that a majority of those workers have already expressed their desire to join United Farm Workers, by signing union cards in June.

But the situation isn’t quite so simple.

James Reinmuth, a former professor and dean emeritus at the University of Oregon’s Lundquist College of Business whom Country Natural Beef paid $1,000, met with 21 workers at the Boardman feedlot in mid-September.

Reinmuth said some workers told him they signed union cards during a barbecue that United Farm Workers sponsored, and further that they thought the cards expressed their support for employees at a nearby dairy, not their own desire to join the union.

The goal here is not complicated: Do employees at the Beef Northwest feedlots want to join United Farm Workers?

Only those employees can answer that question.

And the fairest way to let them answer is to give the employees secret ballots and then leave them alone to mark one box.

Beef Northwest’s critics seem to believe that feedlot workers have either been intimidated or brainwashed by what Cano called “anti-union sentiment.”

But we think the workers are quite a lot more independent, and wise, than that.

If they truly want to join United Farm Workers, then they know how to go about it: by voting, just as tens of millions of Americans did today.

Beef Northwest and Country Natural Beef have pledged to abide by the results.

We’d like to hear the same promise from groups that have advocated for the employees to join United Farm Workers.

What this is about, ultimately, is what the workers want.

It’s time to let them decide.