By Andrew Chung
(Reuters) -The U.S. Supreme Court tightened the reins on organized labor on Wednesday, citing property rights in reviving a bid by two fruit companies to block a decades-old California regulation that let union organizers enter agricultural properties without an employer’s consent.
The 6-3 ruling, with the court’s conservative justices in the majority, found that the regulation that gave union organizers access to two fruit companies’ workers was akin to the government taking private property for public use without just compensation in violation of the U.S. Constitution’s Fifth Amendment. The court’s three liberal justices dissented from the decision.
The justices overturned a 2019 lower court decision throwing out the challenge to the regulation in the most populous U.S. state brought by Dorris, California strawberry producer Cedar Point Nursery and Fresno-based Fowler Packing Company, which ships grapes and mandarin oranges. The ruling made clear that any limitation on the ability of owners to exclude others from their property without compensation is unconstitutional.
“The access regulation grants labor organizations a right to invade the growers’ property. It therefore constitutes a per se physical taking,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the majority.
The regulation’s defenders had argued that such a sweeping ruling could hurt not just union organizing but also food, factory and social work inspections, or even Border Patrol entries onto private property to enforce immigration laws.
It marked the latest setback for unions at the Supreme Court, which in 2018 ruled in another case that non-members cannot be forced, as they are in certain states, to pay fees to unions representing public employees such as police and teachers.
(Reporting by Andrew Chung in New York; Editing by Will Dunham)
