WASHINGTON — Before dawn on an October morning in 2015, representatives of the United Farm Workers turned up at a strawberry plant nursery in Northern California to meet with workers and urge them to consider unionizing. 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. On Monday, the Supreme Court will hear arguments in a case brought by the nursery, which argues that the access regulation amounts to a government taking of private property without compensation. The case, the court’s first major encounter with a labor dispute since the arrival of Justice Amy Coney Barrett, has the potential to define what union organizers can do on California farms. But it could also have far-reaching consequences beyond such campaigns, including limiting the government’s ability to enter private property to conduct health and safety inspections of facilities like coal mines and pharmaceutical plants and to perform home visits by social workers charged with ensuring child welfare.

Source: New York Times March 21, 2021 15:45 UTC