Though he concedes no wrongdoing, a Washington grower has chosen to settle a lawsuit about his alleged bias toward H-2A employees rather than risk an expensive legal battle.
Graham Gamache, president of Cornerstone Ranches in Washington’s Yakima Valley, agreed on Dec. 22 to a $1 million settlement with state attorney general Nick Brown, who in June, in Yakima County Superior Court, accused the farm of offering better wages, hours and duties to H-2A workers than to their domestic counterparts.
“If these cases had been presented at trial to an impartial and unbiased fact finder, we are confident we would have been vindicated in all respects,” said Gamache, a third-generation fruit and hops grower, in a news release.
The money will go to more than 50 farmworkers who were fired, laid off or had hours reduced at the farm west of Toppenish, according to a news release from the attorney general’s office.
Among the farmworkers were eight plaintiffs directly represented in a second but related lawsuit by legal-aid nonprofit Northwest Justice Project, the group that originally referred Cornerstone to the attorney general, said Brendan Monahan, a Yakima attorney representing Cornerstone. Both sides agreed to mediate the cases together, he said.
The suit was termed a “collective action,” which holds a lower legal bar than “class action,” Monahan said. The attorney general never told Cornerstone which of its employees were plaintiffs in the suit, he said.
The deal, signed by Judge Elisabeth Tutsch, also prohibits Cornerstone from applying piece-based productivity standards to domestic farmworkers for any year it also hires H-2A workers — for a period of three years. One of the complaints was that local workers, often women, were held to higher standards than H-2A employees, who were all men.
Gamache denied preferential treatment for anyone. Rather, the plaintiffs based their lawsuits on statistics that lacked context, he said.
“We were presented with unverified, incomplete and often unattributed testimony, as well as a statistical analysis that was absolutely untethered to basic horticultural and agronomic dynamics and brazenly ignorant of the worldwide markets in which hops and apples exist,” he said in his news release.
Cornerstone Ranches’ insurance company paid the settlement and was involved with the mediation.
In a follow-up interview with Good Fruit Grower, Gamache urged other growers who hire H-2A employees to carefully document domestic no-shows. His farm kept careful records when local applicants declined jobs but not when they simply didn’t show up for hours offered.
“Your record-keeping has to go deeper,” he said. •
