West Foods, Inc. v. Unemployment Insurance Appeals Board

Opinion

PARAS, J.

Defendant California Unemployment Insurance Appeals Board (Board) appeals from a judgment commanding it to vacate its decision allowing unemployment benefit payments to employees of West Foods, Inc. (West) and to issue a new decision denying the claims and eliminating charges to West’s reserve account.

The facts are not in dispute. West operates a greenhouse facility in Ventura in which mushrooms are grown in temperature and humidity

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controlled rooms. There are 210 employees at the facility, 85 of whom are pickers paid on a piecerate basis. Cultivation is constant year-round; there is no peak season for mushrooms.

In 1976, the United Farm Workers Union (Union) was the representative of West’s employees. On August 30, the Union called a strike, and picketed until a collective bargaining agreement was reached on September 6. As part of the settlement, West agreed to offer all employees work on September 7 and the Union agreed to waive reporting and standby time provisions of the new contract for pickers until October 15.

During the week of the strike, some of the unharvested mushrooms in the greenhouse rooms matured. Their caps opened, releasing billions of spores into the air. Some spores became diseased and spread to other rooms via the temperature control and ventilating system ducts, infecting growing mushrooms. Over a million pounds of mushrooms in 28 of the 36 rooms were lost to production when the infected rooms were steamed and growth destroyed.

West called all employees back to work on September 7 as agreed, and the mushroom pickers were assigned to clean out the contaminated rooms. The loss of a large portion of the current crop resulted in a lack of available work and full employment for pickers with low seniority was not restored until the end of October.

Twenty-two employees filed unemployment insurance claims for the period following September 7, 1976. The Employment Development Department paid the claims and charged West’s reserve fund. West obtained a hearing before an administrative judge on February 23, 1977. The judge found the claims valid and West appealed to the Board. West contended the employees caused their subsequent unemployment voluntarily through strike activity and were thus ineligible under Board precedents for unemployment benefits. A majority of the Board’s members disagreed, ruling that the trade dispute was settled on September 6 and West’s subsequent inability to resume full production did not indicate that the dispute was still in active progress within the meaning of Unemployment Insurance Code section 1262