Court OKs Picketing on Supermarket Property

SAN BERNARDINO COUNTY — Union pickets can enter parking lots and walkways of California supermarkets without being arrested for trespassing, a federal appeals court ruled Wednesday.

In a case from Indio, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that labor protesters were protected by a 1980 California Supreme Court ruling allowing a political group to collect signatures in a shopping mall over the objections of the mall owner.

The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that private property owners can forbid political activity by outsiders, and can exclude union organizers in most cases. But the state court, relying on broader free speech protections under the California Constitution, said a modern shopping center where the public congregates is the equivalent of a town square, where free expression is permitted.

The ruling was later applied to private property around a supermarket independent of a shopping center. In Wednesday’s decision, the federal court said union picketers whose activity was otherwise protected by federal labor law had the right to enter the same property and hand out leaflets.

“California courts have granted broad protections to the peaceful exercise of free speech rights over property owners’ exclusive control of their property,” said Judge Kim Wardlaw in the 3-0 ruling.

Since the owners could not prohibit members of the public from political activity in the parking lot, they could not stop union members from peacefully picketing and leafleting, she said.

The ruling upheld a National Labor Relations Board order against owners of Indio Grocery Outlet, which tried to stop the United Food and Commercial Workers union from picketing in the store’s parking lot and walkways in 1994 and 1995.