Day laborers won a key victory this week when the Supreme Court refused to hear an appeal by the California city of Redondo Beach over the city’s anti-day-laborer ordinance.
In so doing, the Supreme Court let stand a Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals decision that ruled that prohibiting day laborers from seeking work in the way that Redondo Beach’s ordinance did violated those workers’ free speech rights.
“Today’s denial of Supreme Court review is a singular victory for the First Amendment and its protection of free speech by all persons; the Amendment protects day laborers as well as the wealthiest corporation,” Thomas Saenz, president and general counsel for the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund, which fought the ordinance, said on Tuesday.
Saenz said that the ruling should serve as a warning to other states and localities which have passed laws barring day laborers from soliciting work.
“The dozens of cities in the western United States with markedly similar anti-day labor laws should act immediately to repeal them,” Saenz said. “Each day that these laws remain on the books is a further unconstitutional deterrence of constitutionally protected expression.”
In recent years, states and localities have targeted day laborers by passing ordinances that forbid people from soliciting work in the traditional manner that day laborers do—by waiting on sidewalks or in construction store parking lots—and justifying it as a public safety issue. A similar provision is embedded within Arizona’s SB 1070 and other similar restrictive state laws.
The Supreme Court’s refusal to hear the Redondo Beach case affirms that day laborers in the Ninth Circuit region have the right to seek work in public. It’ll likely have far-reaching impacts. The decision has immediately made the dozens of anti-solicitation laws in the Ninth Circuit region subject to a likely successful legal challenge.
