The U.S. Supreme Court last week ruled in favor of California agriculture growers in a decision that prohibits some forms of union organizing on private worksites, without properly compensating property owners.
“Whatever specific takings issues may be presented by the highly contingent access right we recognized under the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), California’s access regulation effects a per se physical taking under our precedents,” wrote Chief Justice John Roberts in the June 23 opinion addressing Cedar Point Nursery versus Hassid.
Justice Roberts was appointed by former President George W. Bush.
The 6-3 decision found a California regulation permitting union organizers to speak with farmworkers on private property without justly compensating the property owner to be unconstitutional.
“The Supreme Court is instructing the subordinate court to operationalize their decision,” said Timothy Snowball, a civil rights attorney with the Freedom Foundation. “Using the test that the U.S. Supreme Court gave them, the 9th Circuit now has to reconsider whether the Access Regulation of 1975 that California adopted is a taking.”
The opinion states that what qualifies as a per se physical taking is the government occupying a property or allowing another to do so.
“The decision shows that this court is willing to step in and to protect private property rights and is not simply willing to roll over and find against individual property rights, just because there's a regulation at issue,” Snowball told the Southern California Record.
The Wall Street Journal reported that Access Regulation of 1975 gave farmworkers collective-bargaining rights at the behest of labor and civil rights leader Cesar Chavez who died in 1993.
“The Supreme Court is not saying that the state doesn't have an interest in agricultural workers knowing about their collective bargaining rights,” Snowball said. “It's not an anti-union decision. It's simply a decision that is recognizing the primary role of property rights in our constitutional Republic. Property rights are one of the most important guarantees of individual liberty that we have and the court, in this case, is not saying that the state cannot grant unions the right to go onto somebody else's property. Unions are still going to be able to do that. What the U.S. Supreme Court is saying is if they're doing that, they are required to pay the property owner just compensation.”
How much the government should pay to allow union organizers to enter agricultural farms is a question that the lower court will answer, according to Snowball.
“The majority of the U.S. Supreme Court embraced the per se physical taking test but the three justices who disagreed would rather apply the more forgiving regulatory taking standard,” he said.
Democrat Justice Stephen Gerald Breyer, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, and Justice Elena Kagan dissented.
“The Takings Clause prohibits the Government from taking private property for public use without “just compensation,” wrote Justice Breyer. “But the employers do not seek compensation. They seek only injunctive and declaratory relief. Indeed, they did not allege any damages. On remand, California should have the choice of foreclosing injunctive relief by providing compensation. As long as just compensation remedies are available—as they have been for nearly 150 years—injunctive relief will be foreclosed.”