The Supreme Court's union-busting decision in Cedar Point Nursery.

Why do the Supreme Court's  conservative Catholics hate unions?  I guess Pope Leo XIII doesn't matter anymore.   Another case of `following the law, not the Catechism', I suppose.  Absolutism about property rights is one of current day conservatives' worst stances.  But for them it is a first principle.

​For some of us ​Delano - the base of  the United Farmworkers' -  was hallowed ground.  Boycott grapes buttons were liberal icons.  For some of us it started with Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker movement whose principles and pacifism were fused with those of Martin Luther King.  The night before he was murdered Robert F. Kennedy attended mass at Cristo Rey chapel in Oxnard with Cesar Chavez.

Excluded from the National Labor Relations Act, agricultural workers won a big victory via the California law which gave the union the right to go into the fields to reach the workers.  This week in Cedar Point Nursery v. Hassid the United States Supreme Court's anti-labor majority took that right away.  It expanded the concept of "taking" so broadly that the case threatens much more than the farmworkers union which will be its first victim.

- GW - GWC

The Supreme Court's union-busting decision in Cedar Point Nursery.

by Mark Joseph Stern // SLATE

n the 1960s, the United Farm Workers began demanding better pay and working conditions for California’s agricultural workers, who were subject to egregious exploitation and abuse. Led by César Chávez and Dolores Huerta, the union’s campaign culminated in the passage of the California Agricultural Labor Relations Act. Among other guarantees, this landmark law granted union organizers limited, temporary access to agricultural workplaces to speak with laborers. Businesses challenged the act as a violation of their property rights, but in 1976, the U.S. Supreme Court dismissed the case “for want of a substantial federal question.”

The Supreme Court of 2021—stacked, as it is, with six conservative Republican-appointed justices—sees things differently. On Wednesday, the court’s conservative supermajority held that California’s law violates the Fifth Amendment, which bars the taking of private property for public use “without just compensation.” Remarkably, the majority held that the law constitutes a “per se taking”—not a mere regulation, but an “appropriation” of property that flouts the owners’ “right to exclude.” The court’s 6–3 decision in Cedar Point Nursery v. Hassid is thus a crushing blow to organized labor, which often relies on workplace access to safeguard workers’ rights. It also undermines the broader legal framework that permits the government to impose all manner of regulations on private property, including workplace safety laws and nondiscrimination requirements. With Cedar Point, the Supreme Court has handed business owners a loaded gun to aim at every regulation they oppose.