Supreme Court rules on case implicating union access to organize agricultural workers

 Here's the New York Times report by Adam Liptak, which describes the case: 

The case, Cedar Point Nursery v. Hassid, No. 20-107, arose from organizing efforts in 2015 at Fowler Packing Company, a shipper of table grapes and citrus, and Cedar Point Nursery, which grows strawberry plants. They sued California officials in 2016, saying the regulation letting unions to have access to their properties amounted to a government taking of private property without compensation. The growers lost in the lower courts.

The state regulation, issued in 1975 and unique in the nation, 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.

The decision strikes me as another illustration of the lack of law's meaningful presence in rural places. In this case, by denying unions access to workers, the result is a failure to protect vulnerable rural workers because an institution that could protect them is hamstrung from a meaningful opportunity to do so.  My colleague Aaron Tang put the case in broader context in relation to labor laws here for NPR. Los Angeles Times coverage of the case is here.  New York Times coverage is here.  

Interestingly, Cedar Point Nursery, the named plaintiff, is in Dorris, California, population 939, a truly remote and rural locale, in far northern California near the Oregon state line.  This is intriguing to me because so much of California agriculture is in the Central Valley, which is dotted by cities like Fresno, Merced, and Modesto.  Not so far northern California, including places like Siskiyou and Modoc County.  The largest cities near Dorris are Redding, California (2 hours), Klamath Falls, Oregon (22 minutes), and Medford, Oregon (1 hour, 39 minutes).

I previously wrote about the case here.