Posted on 10/01/2014 7:38:54 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
Hey, no bigs. The state just fined a tiny winery $115,000 for using volunteers who were learning to make wine while getting the vineyard’s product to market. They were illegal paid labor, you see. Can’t have two free parties engaging in a trade of labor for specialized knowledge without the state getting involved and depriving the area of this particular business, its job opportunities, and its wares. Congrats, public. You have been served and protected:
A small-time vintner’s use of volunteer workers has put him out of business after the state squeezed him like a late-summer grape for $115,000 in fines — and sent a chill through the wine industry.
The volunteers, some of them learning to make wine while helping out, were illegally unpaid laborers, and Westover Winery should have been paying them and paying worker taxes, the state Department of Industrial Relations said.
“I didn’t know it was illegal to use volunteers at a winery; it’s a common practice,” said winery owner Bill Smyth.
State law prohibits for-profit businesses from using volunteers.
Before the fine, volunteer labor was common at wineries in the nearby Livermore Valley, said Fenestra Winery owner Lanny Replogle.
Smyth says he wasn’t just using volunteers in exchange for skills in an unofficial capacity, but had a true internship program, which should be allowed under California law. Many other wineries are now contemplating their own use of volunteers and interns, and many wine enthusiasts will no doubt lose such opportunities in the future:
“I had a formal internship program here with classroom study and everything,” Smyth told Wine Searcher. “I have volunteers because they want to be here. The volunteers are all professional people. A lot of them work at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory. They all have their own health insurance.”
Smyth, a retired teacher, said he usually works only about 10 hours a week at the winery, which is off the beaten path in Castro Valley, a rural suburb about 25 miles east of San Francisco. He said he sells about $200,000 worth of wine a year and nets about $11,000 in income.
“I did this for the passion and love of wine, just like all the volunteers do,” Smyth said.
A state spokesperson’s response was to whine about what might happen if there were a “catastrophic accident” (lawsuits?) and that it wasn’t “fair” for wineries that have to pay employees to compete with wineries who don’t. I don’t think anybody was worried that this $11,000-a-year empire was going to put anybody out of business, and it’s the state that mandated this system in the first place. Whenever anybody who works in government talks about creating a level field for the marketplace, you know some small business owner somewhere is about to get screwed over. The story notes that there are many small wineries like this one in the area who rely on volunteers. They had to send them all home.
You can visit these reckless rule-breakers at their Facebook page to offer your condolences.
How dare they take food from the mouth of Pelosi’s billionaire husband!!
So, if these people can think of a good enough excuse, they don’t believe they have to follow the laws less imaginative people do?
I’m having a disconnect here. There are all sorts of intern programs. There’s publicity encouraging the learning experience, and sometimes the charity of it. Why was this winery singled out for minimum wage “abuse” attention from the government? Why not a bank, or a PAC?
Must not have donated enough $$ to the Party of Big Government.
Vermont is full of small farms that take on volunteer workers, or people who want to learn about farming, and so on. We don’t have Democrat-sponsored factory farms in Vermont where the taxpayers effectively pay the bills, so those kinds of informal arrangements are about the only way that local food production can survive here.
Want to learn how to grow mushrooms on logs? Then find someone in town who does it. Want to learn how to raise crops without chemicals? Same thing.
Kind of funny, that such a liberal state follows sane policies in many areas. The same with guns. Vermont is chock full of hippies with guns.
Monica Lewinsky was a Volunteer. Just saying...
Or a Congressman or Senator?
I laugh when people use the term “corporate greed”.
No one and nothing is greedier than the State, which has no end to its appetites.
Probably a larger competitor bitching about it. Big business loves regulation. Keeps the little guy from horning-in on the profits.
Fascists.
Could they have charged their volunteers a nominal fee and called them students?
Now we're cookin'. I had to get out of the PR business because I had to write outrageously dishonest stuff about free enterprise and "market competition" for our big clients. Big companies hate competition and the free market. The last thing in the world they want is a small upstart competitor who has a better idea -- and price. Invent a better mousetrap and the Big Guys will do everything in their power to shut you down.
Charge them a dollar each to attend a hands on wine making class.
good idea
Vintner College
“...Winery should have been paying them and paying worker taxes, the state Department of Industrial Relations said.”
No more need be said.
I know it is a Mafia analogy but the .gov operates very similarly. They are the biggest gang in town except they dress better, usually.
Baloney. Many companies use interns.
Someone with some stroke complained. Its an abuse of power, and if you could get to the bottom of it you would find that the complaint came from a friend of someone in power.
If you're smart, you get out of California. Sell and move to anywhere, but get out if you don't want to be harassed and sucked dry under color of law.
There are, no doubt, all kinds of certification fees, inspection fees, and record-keeping costs that the state requires for an educational institute.
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