Things are looking up for the workers at Fresno-based Gerawan Farming, years-long victims of California’s Agricultural Labor Relations Board (ALRB).

On Thursday May 14th, a panel of Fifth District Court of Appeals judges in California ruled the ALRB’s Mandatory Mediation and Conciliation Statute (MMC) – which gives the board the power to unilaterally force union contracts on workers and businesses – unconstitutional, saying:

“The MMC statute violates equal protection principles and constitutes an improper delegation of legislative authority.”

The Center for Worker Freedom’s Matt Patterson, who helped shed light on the corrupt ALRB through a nation-wide public awareness campaign, wrote in the FlashReport:

“The court agrees that no one should be forced into association against their will…in the United States we fought a revolution and civil war to uphold that very idea.”

This ruling is a major step towards ending the board’s inhumane silencing of the Gerawan workers, which began when the farm workers voted to decertify the United Farm Workers (UFW) union from their workplace in 2013. The ALRB – appointed by California’s Democratic Governor – sequestered the decertification votes and has yet to count them.

Union representatives have already announced plans to appeal the Fifth District decision to California’s Supreme Court.

Meanwhile, both the union and farm workers are waiting on the verdict of an ALRB hearing that began in September 2014, when the union filed unfair labor practice charges against Gerawan. This hearing finally came to a close 105 days and 130 witnesses later, making it the both the longest and most expensive agricultural trial in California’s history.

Administrative law judge Mark Soble presided over the trial and is expected to announce his decision sometime this summer. His verdict will be appealed to the full ALRB in Sacramento.

The fate of both hearings is unknown, but one thing is certain:

In the United States, the land of the free, people should neither be denied their voice nor their freedom to assemble as they choose. Corrupt bureaucrats in California have robbed the farm workers of both basic rights.

As Patterson wrote in his FlashReport column, such unconstitutional behavior is “a shame and a stain on the golden promise that was California.”