Gov. Jared Polis on Friday signed into law a measure backed by Democrats that will grant farmworkers the right to join unions and engage in collective bargaining.

“For too long, a certain kind of worker has been fully or partially excluded from protections that every other worker in Colorado takes for granted,” said Polis, who arrived to the bill signing ceremony on the west steps of the state Capitol to chants of “Sí se puede!” (“Yes we can” in Spanish.)

“This bill will fix that and move forward.”

Polis also sung the praises of Sens. Jessie Danielson, who carried Senate Bill 87 along with Sen. Dominick Moreno, D-Commerce City, and Reps. Karen McCormick, D-Longmont, and Yadira Caraveo, D-Thornton. The governor touted the Wheat Ridge Democrat as “one of the biggest champions of workers in the state legislature,” and she in turn directed her praise to “the generations of activists and hard workers dedicated to the farm workers movement that came before us.”

“This is a good day for Colorado. This is a good day for ag. This is a good day for farm workers all across the state,” Danielson said.

Under the bill, workers have the right to seek action in the courts for retaliation or other complaints, require that they be paid minimum wage and overtime pay, and that employers provide workers with transportation and access to “key service providers,” including health care providers, clergy and lawyers.

They also would be entitled to rest and meal breaks during the day and a ban on short-handled hoes, cited as a tool that causes injury because the worker must bend over for hours to use it.

The ceremony drew a crowd of advocates and featured speakers from the group Towards Justice, the AFL-CIO and Frontline Farming praised the legislation. 

“We stand here to change almost a hundred years of racially motivated exclusion for ag workers from basic labor protections, many of whom are still Black and brown,” said Fatuma Emmad of Frontline Farming and Project Protect Food Systems.

But while the proponents of the policy celebrated at the signing ceremony, a 6-3 ruling from the U.S. Supreme Court passed down earlier this week could have implications for the effort.

The Court ruled in Cedar Point Nursery v. Hassid that a California regulation that required agricultural employers to allow union reps on their property to unionize farmworkers is unconstitutional and a violation of the Fifth and Fourteenth amendments, specifically calling the regulation a “taking.”

The California regulation in Cedar Point Nursery said that agricultural employers must allow union organizers onto their property for up to three hours per day, 120 days per year. While that’s not in SB 87, the Colorado Department of Labor and Employment would conduct rulemaking that would set guidelines on how union organizers contact farmworkers.

According to Moreno, that level of specificity is what made California’s regulation problematic. He told Colorado Politics that the bill sponsors were aware that the court case was in process, and made sure to work with organizations like Colorado Farm Bureau on language granting reasonable access.

The Commerce City Democrat told Colorado Politics he believes the statute is broad enough to avoid running afoul of the decision.

“The California regulation was incredibly specific, and that opened the door to this argument of an illegal taking,” Moreno said. “This is private property, which the Court takes very seriously and something we wanted to avoid in the development of SB 87.”