How to turn a union organizer into a cable junction box: Union access to workers, the property right to exclude, and the United States Supreme Court's alchemical geographical imagination

Abstract

This paper focuses on the 2021 US Supreme Court decision in Cedar Point Nurseries v. Hassid. In its decision the Court invalidated a 45-year old California regulation that allowed union organizers onto growers' properties under very limited conditions for the purposes of discussing the merits of unionization. In making its ruling, the Court effected a broad and significant expansion of property-owners “right to exclude” that will affect not only union organizing, but quite probably food safety inspection regimes, oversight of care homes, workplace safety enforcement and other activities where property owners have been required to allow third parties on their property in the pursuance of the public good. The paper focuses on the development and necessity of the access rule, the history of growers' attempts to have it invalidated on constitutional grounds, and the reasoning by the Court that has made growers – and property-rights activists more broadly – victorious at last. The paper relies on archival research, a close reading of precedential cases, a large number of friend-of-the-court briefs, oral testimony and both the majority's and dissent's reading of the facts in order to expose how the Court deploys an alchemical geographical imagination in ways that advances the interests of the capitalist and property-owning classes. The paper contributes to ongoing research in political geography on the sources, meanings, and geographical effects of law by showing examining the Court's ability to deploy law's interpretive flexibility in ways that enhance its structural determination of the contours of class struggle.