In a 6-3 ruling along ideological lines, the US Supreme Court this week overturned a California regulation allowing union organizers to enter workplaces to recruit agricultural workers...on the grounds it violates the employing company's Fifth Amendment’s “takings” clause without just compensation. 

The ruling marks the latest blow in a devastating campaign to roll back hard-won victories for the US labor movement in favor of businesses.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: Thursday, June 23, 2021

Contact: Greg Coleridge, [email protected], (216) 255-2184

Move to Amend Condemns Supreme Court’s Cedar Point Nursery v. Hassid Decision

Court Overturns Long Standing Farmworkers’ Victory to Expand Corporate Constitutional Rights Doctrine

In a 6-3 ruling along ideological lines, the US Supreme Court yesterday overturned a California regulation allowing union organizers to enter workplaces to recruit agricultural workers on the grounds it violates the Fifth Amendment’s “takings” clause without just compensation. 

The ruling marks the latest blow in a devastating campaign to roll back hard-won victories for the US labor movement in favor of businesses. The regulation has been in place since the 1970s after the United Farm Workers union successfully argued that the only practical way to give farmworkers a realistic chance to consider union membership was to allow organizers to enter workplaces, one the major achievements of the farmworkers’ movement led by Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta.

“For-profit corporations have always been favored over non-profit unions under the Court’s illegitimate doctrine of corporate constitutional rights. Now the Roberts’ Court is flaunting its favoritism with reckless abandon,” stated Kaitlin Sopoci-Belknap, National Director of Move to Amend. “It is bad enough that corporations can hijack Fifth Amendment rights against takings to overturn or demand compensation for lost profits from community-backed regulations, but now it’s been expanded that right to directly undermine a workers’ First Amendment rights to free speech and free association. We reject the Court’s disturbing opinion and call on Congress to amend the U.S.Constitution by passing H.J.R. 48, the We the People Amendment, to make clear that constitutional rights belong to human beings, not artificial corporations.”

Move to Amend is a growing national grassroots coalition of nearly 475,000 individuals and hundreds of organizations working to pass a constitutional amendment to state that Constitutional rights belong to human beings only, not to corporations and other artificial entities, and that campaign spending is not a form of protected speech under the First Amendment and can be regulated. The group formed in 2009 in preparation for the Supreme Court's Citizens United v. FEC ruling on January 21, 2010. Their We The People Amendment was first introduced in the US House of Representatives on April 29, 2015. 

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Move to Amend representatives are available for interviews with the press about the Cedar Rapids Nursery v. Hassid case. To arrange an interview, please contact [email protected] or call 216-255-2184.

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