Supreme Court could keep unions off farms
California’s decadesold rules allowing farm labor union organizers onto growers’ property during some nonworking hours were challenged Monday in the U.S. Supreme Court, where the outcome appeared to turn on a single question: Can the organizers be barred without also excluding government health and safety inspectors from private property?
“Why doesn’t promoting peaceful labor relations fall under the same category as safety inspections?” Chief Justice John Roberts asked Joshua Thompson, a lawyer for two California growers challenging the state regulations, with support from the agriculture industry.
Thompson replied that longstanding legal principles allow government inspectors onto private property, and that the unions were there to recruit, not to inspect. Justice Stephen Breyer, apparently unpersuaded, asked whether a government mining inspector could ask employees about their working conditions — the same inquiry a union organizer might make — and, if so, why rules admitting union representatives would violate landowners’ rights.
Because the same longstanding principles allow owners to exclude private citizens from their property, Thompson said, and “when the government takes that right from you,” as California has done, “it has to compensate you.”
The state’s Agricultural Labor Relations Board adopted the rules shortly after California’s passage in 1975 of the nation’s first law allowing farmworkers to join unions. They allow union representatives onto farmers’ property for an hour before work, an hour after work and during the lunch hour, for up to 40 days a year.
The state Supreme Court upheld the rules in 1976, and growers did not challenge
them until 40 years later, in a suit by a strawberry grower in Siskiyou County and a grape and citrus farm in Fresno. The Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco upheld the regulations in 2019, saying the state was not interfering substantially with the owners’ control of their property by allowing
union entry for limited periods.
Several justices seemed inclined to reject that conclusion Monday based on the court’s past interpretations of federal labor law, including a 1956 ruling that employers could bar union representatives from their property if the union could contact work
ers through “reasonable efforts” by “other available channels.” That ruling allowed a company to prevent organizers from entering company parking lots to hand out prounion leaflets.
“Don’t you win” under that precedent? Justice Sonia Sotomayor asked Thompson, apparently seeking a formula for a narrow ruling that would not apply to government inspections. Justice Brett Kavanaugh said the California rules allowed more intrusion on private property than the parkinglot entries the court barred in 1956.
But the state farm labor board that granted union access 20 years later said farm labor unions faced obstacles in contacting workers outside the workplace: Many of them are migrants, their work schedules change frequently, there are no nearby public areas where they regularly gather, and they can seldom be reached at permanent addresses or telephone numbers.
The union presence authorized by the rules “is not the functional equivalent of the government taking over their farm,” California’s solicitor general, Michael Mongan, told the court. “The union organizers are not allowed to interfere with the property or agricultural operations” but only to contact workers who are not on duty and may be impossible to reach otherwise.
A ruling in Cedar Point Nursery vs. Hassid, No. 20107,