High court to hear case about union campaigns and private property
WASHINGTON » Before dawn on an October morning in 2015, representatives of the United Farm Workers turned up at a strawberry plant nursery in Northern California to meet with workers and urge them to consider unionizing.
They were able to enter the nursery’s property thanks to a state regulation, issued in 1975 and unique in the nation, that allows union organizers to meet with agricultural workers at work sites in the hour before and after work and during lunch breaks for as many as 120 days a year. The regulation’s drafters said this was the only practical way to give farmworkers, who can be nomadic and poorly educated, a realistic chance to consider joining a union.
On Monday, the Supreme Court will hear arguments in a case brought by the nursery, which argues that the access regulation amounts to a government taking of private property without compensation.
The case, the court’s first major encounter with a labor dispute since the arrival of Justice Amy Coney Barrett, has the potential to define what union organizers can do on California farms. But it could also have far-reaching consequences beyond such campaigns, including limiting the government’s ability to enter private property to conduct health and safety inspections of facilities like coal mines and pharmaceutical plants and to perform home visits by social workers charged with ensuring child welfare.
There are reasons to believe the court will be skeptical of the access regulation. The court has in recent years dealt blows to public unions and limited the ability of workers to band together to take legal action over workplace issues. At the same time, the court has been protective of property rights.
A video from that October morning shows a boisterous crowd waving union flags and speaking in Spanish on bullhorns. The two sides differ about what it depicts.
Mike Fahner, who owns Cedar Point Nursery, the business at the center of the case, said the video was evidence of an invasion. “We had strangers on bullhorns starting to march up and down through our buildings and literally harassing people, trying to coerce them to go outside,” he said. “They’re here to work.”
Mario Martínez, the general counsel of United Farm Workers, said he saw no union organizers on the video, noting that the access regulation does not allow them to enter work areas. “The video shows workers going out on strike — their own workers,” he said.
The union’s organizing campaign at Cedar Point was short-lived, as officials soon concluded that there was not enough support among the workers to conduct an election. Cedar Point filed unfair labor practices charges, saying the union “organized a strike on private property, blocked ingress and egress, interfered with production activities, created an atmosphere of intimidation and coercion and took access improperly.”
In 2016, the California Agricultural Labor Relations Board sided with the union, dismissing the charges. “While UFW organizers met with striking employees and were present during the strike,” a board official wrote, “the actions of the striking workers are not attributable to the UFW.”
Although there is no other law like the one in California, the Supreme Court has said a federal labor law, one that excludes agricultural workers, may allow union organizers to enter private property in limited circumstances. “If the location of a plant and the living quarters of the employees place the employees beyond the reach of reasonable union efforts to communicate with them,” Justice Stanley Reed wrote for the court in 1956, “the employer must allow the union to approach his employees on his property.”