Ruling: Justices strike down California law giving unions “right of access” to farms.
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Wednesday struck down part of a historic California law inspired by Cesar Chavez and the farmworkers union, ruling that agricultural landowners and food processors have a right to keep union organizers off their property.
The justices by a 63 vote said the state’s “right of access” rule violates property rights protected by the Constitution, which states private property shall not be “taken for public use without just compensation.” The three liberal justices dissented.
Writing for the majority, Chief Justice John Roberts said “the access regulation is not germane to any benefit provided to agricultural employers or any risk posed to the public. The access regulation grants labor organizations a right to invade the growers’ property.”
The California Legislature in 1975 became the first in the nation to extend collective bargaining rights to farmworkers. Months later, a new agricultural labor board adopted the “right of access” rule to allow organizers to seek out those working on farmland during nonworking hours.
It has come under attack in recent years by agribusinesses that called it a “union trespassing” rule.
The case before the court began in 2015. The owners of the Fowler Packing Co. in Fresno, which produces grapes and citrus fruit, refused to allow union organizers onto their property. A few months later, union organizers entered a strawberry packing plant near the Oregon border and disrupted the work, according to Mike Fahner, owner of the Cedar Point Nursery.
The two companies then joined in a lawsuit seeking to have the California union access regulation declared unconstitutional. They lost before a federal judge and the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco, but the Supreme Court voted to hear their appeal.
William Gould, a Stanford law professor and former chairman of both the state Agricultural Labor Relations Board and the National Labor Relations Board, said the court had ignored the judgments of state officials and the needs of rural farm laborers.
When ALRB members toured California’s fields in 2016, Gould said, “we found that the the plight of farmworkers was worse than in 1975, given their undocumented status which isolates them in fear of the outside world; the inability of many aboriginal workers to speak English or Spanish; (and) isolation through lack of iPhones,” Gould said. Their only source of information about their rights, he said, came in visits from union representatives.