A state with a large presence of agricultural properties has adopted a law giving ‘trespassers’ a right to access those lands while speaking to workers there, despite a Supreme Court precedent that struck down that very strategy in another state.
It is Colorado that adopted recently an Agricultural Workers’ Rights law that requires those landowners to provide access to those visitors, or “service providers” such as union officials or counselors, who want to contact their workers on site.
The state’s decision came despite the fact the Supreme Court ruled in Cedar Point Nursery v. Hassid just last year that a similar California statute was invalid because its “access regulation [that] appropriates a right to invade growers’ property .. constitutes a per se physical taking.”
So now Colorado, too, is facing a lawsuit over its “taking.”
A coalition of employers and property owners has charged the state is violating their Fifth Amendment rights, through the imposition of the new requirements by the Department of Labor and Employment.
According to a report at Courthousenews, Colorado, which has large sections of fruit-growing farms on its Western slope and vast grain production in the east, is trying to ban farms and ranches from “controlling” those who want to meet with their workers.
“Under the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments, plaintiffs have a right to be free from laws that take private property for public use without providing a mechanism for awarding just compensation,” the lawsuit charges.
“Defendants are charged with enforcing the access provisions, which physically take an interest in private property, but afford agricultural employers no means of obtaining just compensation for that per se taking.”