alarm

Jessica Govea Thorbourne, a charismatic organizer for the United Farm Workers union, who raised early alarms about fieldworkers’ exposure to dangerous pesticides and led table grape boycotts in Canada that helped win acceptance for the union at home, died Jan. 23 of breast cancer at a rehabilitation center in West Orange, N.J. She was 58.

Govea Thorbourne worked closely with UFW co-founder Cesar Chavez for 16 years, beginning when she was 19. Two years later she was directing crucial boycotts in Canada that helped the union win one of its first contracts with a California grape grower and ultimately settle with the entire industry.

She also led voter registration and get-out-the-vote drives for a number of Democratic candidates, including presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy during his California Democratic primary campaign, Gov. Jerry Brown, Sen. Alan Cranston and Art Torres, who served 20 years in the California Legislature before becoming the first Latino chairman of the state Democratic Party.

She later moved to the East Coast and spent the last two decades as a labor educator, teaching organizing skills at Rutgers and Cornell universities.

Govea Thorbourne’s contributions to the farmworker movement have been largely unheralded, but stories such as hers “are really the true history of the union,” Jerry Cohen, the UFW’s general counsel from 1967 to 1981, told The Times this week. “She is like the heart and soul of the union when it was at its best.”

Born in Porterville, Calif., Govea Thorbourne went to work in the fields with her parents when she was only 4. She spent every summer until she was 15 in backbreaking toil, filling bags with cotton bolls, scrambling on her knees to pick up prunes that been shaken from trees, and clipping bunches of grapes from row after row of vines while trying to avoid the wasps that hovered over the fruit.

A childhood photo of her shows a smiling, pigtailed girl in a white shirt and denim pants leaning on a shovel, but Govea Thorbourne’s memories of those days were far from sunny. Her skin would itch and burn, which she at first thought was caused by the heat but later attributed to the pesticides that covered the plants she touched every day. “The thing I hated most, though, was that there was no toilet. I just had to find a place and hope no one could see,” she said in the 2001 book “We Were There, Too,” which profiles reformers whose activism took root during their youth.

Her father, Juan Govea, was a respected leader of the Mexican American community in Bakersfield when Cesar Chavez and Fred Ross Sr. recruited him to help organize local workers for their Community Service Organization, a precursor of the UFW. Govea Thorbourne accompanied her father as he went door to door, listening to people’s stories of the struggles they encountered in their jobs, at government offices and in their children’s schools.

“My father never talked down to people. He listened carefully and spoke respectfully,” she said. “I learned a lot about organizing just from listening to these conversations.”

By age 9 she was helping her father turn out leaflets about the Community Service Organization meetings and reciting patriotic poems at rallies. At 12, she was president of the Junior CSO and led other farmworker children in a successful petition drive for a neighborhood park after her best friend was killed by a speeding truck while taking her siblings to a park three miles away. “That was the first time she led an organizing campaign,” said Fred Ross Jr., a fellow organizer who worked for the UFW from 1966 to 1977.

After she graduated from Bakersfield High School, Govea Thorbourne joined the National Farm Workers Assn. (later renamed the United Farm Workers), which Chavez had formed in 1962. She was a caseworker helping union families when three women came to her for help dealing with rashes, headaches and dizzy spells. They were told their problems were caused by heat exhaustion, but Govea Thorbourne believed the cause was pesticide poisoning.

At first, union leaders did not pay much attention to the alarms she was trying to raise, but she persisted until they “finally made pesticides an issue,” Cohen said.

The adverse effects of pesticide exposure became a central part of the story UFW organizers told to build support for the boycotts. The issue received national attention when then-Sen. Walter F. Mondale (D-Minn.) made pesticides a focus of Senate hearings on migrant workers in 1969.

“When we won contracts with the grape industry,” Cohen said, “we put in clauses to protect farmworkers from pesticide. Jessica was the first to raise the issue in an insistent manner.”

Govea Thorbourne was only 21 when she and Marshall Ganz were sent to Canada in 1968 to enlist consumers there in the union’s fight against growers.

“She earned a real following up there,” said Ganz, now a lecturer in public policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard.

“She was a gifted speaker … and she could sing [the farmworkers’ story] as well as speak it,” he added, recalling songs she sang that conveyed the longing and sadness in the workers’ lives.

By winning broad-based support among students, labor and churches, Govea Thorbourne and Ganz drew millions of Canadians in Toronto and Montreal — then among the top five markets for California table grapes — into the boycott, which gave the UFW critical leverage in its fight for recognition at the bargaining table.

“The boycott they led was one of the most effective and key in settling the grape strike,” said Eliseo Medina, a former UFW board member who is now a national officer of the Service Employees International Union. “Mind you, when the boycott began, there was no formula for how to do a boycott. Marshall and Jessica invented the formula, and many of us learned from that.”

Govea Thorbourne would later serve as national director of organizing for the union and in 1977 became a member of the UFW’s executive board. Years later, as an educator, she would often tell the young union workers she was training that she was not even sure where Canada was when she volunteered to go there.

“People who were thinking they could never do something like this drew strength from hearing her talk. She was very humble,” said Ken Margulies, who worked closely with her as director of training programs for labor organizers at Cornell’s School of Industrial Labor Relations.

At Cornell she worked extensively with Chinese-speaking members of Local 1199 of the Service Employees International Union, which represents healthcare workers. She also helped train coffee-processing workers in El Salvador in the early 1990s.

Although she could not prove the connection, she believed that her cancer, which was diagnosed in 1993, was caused by her exposure to pesticides as a youth working in the fields, according to her husband, Kenneth Thorbourne Jr., whom she married in 1987.

She also is survived by her mother, Margaret Govea; two sisters; and two brothers.

Her husband said that, despite her suspicions about the origins of her illness, she was never bitter about her fate and continued to work until last fall, when the cancer spread to her brain.

SACRAMENTO — As Democratic leaders in California challenge President Trump’s latest effort to restrict the use of mail-in ballots, they also must grapple with a troubling development in the last election.

A significant number of mail-in ballots arrived too late to be counted in the Nov. 4 special election for Proposition 50, Gov. Gavin Newsom’s successful measure to reconfigure the state’s congressional districts, according to state data.

Ballots came in late at an average rate four times higher than that of the 2024 election, with rural counties seeing some of the biggest increases, according to a Times review.

“Something changed,” said Melvin E. Levey, who heads the Merced County Registrar of Voters. “We don’t like seeing late ballots and if someone has made the effort to vote, we want to count it.”

Merced saw almost a sevenfold increase in late-arriving mail ballots in the November election compared with the year before.

Vote-by-mail ballots are considered late if they are not postmarked on or ahead of election day or do not arrive within seven days of election day.

The issue appears to be linked to the U.S. Postal Service, which last year reduced the number of trips to pick up mail at post offices in mostly rural areas. Election officials warned before Nov. 4 that the Postal Service changes could delay the postmarking of ballots and lead to votes not being counted.

During the Nov. 4 election in California, an average of 8 out of every 1,000 vote-by-mail ballots were rejected by counties because they arrived too late, according to Secretary of State data. In the 2024 general election, which included the presidential race, an average of 2 of every 1,000 vote-by-mail ballots were rejected for being late.

In Kern County, for example, 3,303 mail-in ballots — or 1.95% of returned mail-in ballots — were not counted in the 2025 special election because they arrived too late. In 2024, that number was 332 — or 0.14%. And in Riverside County, 5,831 ballots — or 0.95% of those mailed in — were deemed too late to count, more than double the number of late ballots rejected in 2024.

Postal Service spokesperson Cathy Purcell recommended that voters mail their ballot a week in advance of when it must be received by election officials to ensure it arrives on time.

“You should never be mailing your ballot on election day,” Purcell told The Times.

Before last’s year’s special election, California Secretary of State Shirley Weber issued a similar warning about the delays. Anyone dropping off their ballot at a post office on election day should get it postmarked at the counter, she said.

“We don’t want anyone to just toss it into the mailbox as we have been able to do in the past and have it counted,” she said. “The Postal Service has said that they may not be counted in certain areas.”

California voter data expert Paul Mitchell expressed astonishment about the Postal Service’s guidance.

“We’ve had six, eight years of elections where people were feeling confident about mailing in their ballot,” said Mitchell, vice president of the voter data firm Political Data Inc. “Now the USPS is saying they have to mail it in a week early.”

“That is a dramatic change that can disenfranchise voters who are just following the same pattern that they’ve used in prior elections,” he added.

Democrats have been defending the vote-by-mail system in the face of Republican attacks. Trump recently signed an executive order to impose federal restrictions on mail-in ballots and, without evidence, has long criticized mail-in ballots as a source of fraud and a factor in his 2020 election loss to Joe Biden.

The Nov. 4 special election on Proposition 50 was the Democrats’ attempt to counter Trump’s push for Republican-led states, most notably Texas, to redraw their electoral maps to keep Democrats from gaining control of the U.S. House of Representatives in the 2026 midterms and upending his agenda. The ballot measure overwhelmingly passed.

Nearly 89% of votes in the Nov. 4 election were vote-by-mail ballots, according to Weber’s office. In addition to Proposition 50, tax measures were also on the ballots in some counties.

Postal Service changes

About a month before the Nov. 4 election, Weber and Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta held a news conference to encourage California voters to vote early because of service changes at the U.S. Postal Service.

Bonta told reporters that voters living 50 or more miles from six large mail processing centers in urban areas who mailed their ballots on election day would not have those ballots postmarked in time. The centers are in Los Angeles, Bell Gardens, San Diego, Santa Clarita, Richmond and West Sacramento, according to Bonta’s office.

The changes at the U.S. Postal Service are part of a 10-year plan that kicked off several years ago aimed at improving services and reducing costs at the independent federal agency.

In the 17 counties that are mostly or entirely within the 50-mile distance from the mail facilities, the average rate of late ballots doubled in the November 2025 election compared with the election the year before — from 2.5 per 1,000 ballots received in 2024 to 5.6 per 1,000 in 2025.

But in counties that are entirely or mostly outside of the 50-mile radius, the average rate of late ballots quadrupled — from 2 per 1,000 ballots received in 2024 to 9.3 per 1,000 in 2025, state election records show.

Similar complaints about late ballots because of the mail changes have been reported in other states, including in Snohomish County, Wash., according to the New York Times.

The U.S. Postal Services told the Times that there are “any number of factors” that may affect the timeliness of mail.

“The Postal Service has successfully delivered America’s election mail, and we are confident that we will do so again this year,” spokesperson Nikolaj Hagen said. “We rely on long-standing, robust and tested policies and procedures, which have proven successful in the secure and timely delivery of election mail.”

Hagen added that “adjustments to our transportation operations will result in some mailpieces not arriving at our originating processing facilities on the same day that they are mailed.”

Postmarks are generally applied at those processing facilities, Hagen said, so the postmark date may not reflect the date the mail was collected by a letter carrier, dropped off at a retail location, or placed in a collection box.

While the U.S. Postal Service uses postmarking as an internal tool to track the place and date the mail was accepted, outside entities also use the postmarks for their own purposes, including the Internal Revenue Service, which requires federal tax returns to be mailed by April 15.

Several U.S. senators, including Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.), sent a letter in January to USPS Postmaster Gen. Dave Steiner warning that changes to postmarking will make it more difficult for people, particularly those in rural areas, to vote by mail and pay tax bills on time.

On Tuesday, Trump signed an executive order that seeks to put new federal controls on voting by mail in states, repeating his long-held but unsubstantiated claim that mail-in ballots are a source of widespread fraud in U.S. elections.

The order directs the U.S. Postal Service to take control of mail balloting by designing new envelopes with special bar codes that will allow the federal government to ensure that such ballots go out only to eligible voters.

States must follow the USPS process if they plan to use the federal mail system for sending or receiving ballots. They also must submit to the USPS lists of eligible voters in advance of such ballots passing through the mail system.

Separately, the Republican National Committee is challenging a Mississippi law that allows ballots that arrive up to five days after election day to be accepted and counted. The case was argued before the conservative-leaning U.S. Supreme Court in March.

Times staff reporter Kevin Rector contributed to this report.

A travel expert claims he has saved money by looking for flights at a specific time, and early risers could bag a bargain, but there are also other ways to cut the cost of your flight

A travel expert has claimed that the time you book a flight can be just as important as the day you choose to travel, and that setting your alarm at a very specific time could help you land the best deals.

Jamie Fraser, owner of Wild Packs, claims that the cheapest time to book flights is exactly 2:48am in what could be good news for night owls and insomniacs. He also claims that evening searches between 8pm and 2pm can also be around 5% cheaper than searching during peak morning hours.

Airlines will often raise prices when they see heavy demand for a destination, so if lots of other people are up at the same time looking for the same route and dates, this could potentially put prices up. Jamie says: “Most people search for flights first thing in the morning while they’re having coffee, but that’s exactly when everyone else is doing the same thing.

“When airline systems see that spike in demand, prices can rise quickly. It’s one of the easiest ways travellers overpay. The cheapest time to book is usually in the early hours of the morning, around 2:48 am, when far fewer people are searching, and airline pricing systems have reset overnight.”

He added: “If you’re not willing to set a 2 am alarm, the next best option is late evening. Booking between 8 pm and 10 pm can still save around 5% compared to that busy morning window.”

So does this hack work? In the early years of internet travel booking, airlines and other sites would update their fares manually overnight. This meant that savvy travellers could sometimes pick up middle of the night bargains. However, nowadays, it’s more complex because systems have evolved, so you may still need a bit of luck on your side.

You could also potentially save money by using Jamie’s other suggested hack, which is to set up price alerts rather than checking fares repeatedly. Jamie also reiterated the often given advice that travellers should be flexible with travel plans, looking out for different airlines, dates, or nearby airports.

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If you use sites such as Skyscanner, you can often tick a ‘nearby airports’ box, as an airport a short drive away could end up being cheaper. If you’re flexible on destination, for example you simply want to go somewhere sunny with a beach, then choosing ‘everywhere’ as a destination will show you the cheapest options for your dates.

It’s also worth signing up for emails from specific airlines and looking out for deals such as flash sales or kids fly for free offers, which often have limited availability and need to be snapped up quickly.

Have a story you want to share? Email us at webtravel@reachplc.com