A New York farmworker was fired for organizing. State Supreme Court says that’s legal

For its part, the NYCLU argued that the exclusion of farmworkers from fair labor laws at both the federal and state levels is a relic of a racist Jim Crow-era policy, the product of a compromise between Franklin Roosevelt’s administration and southern Democrats (known as the “Dixiecrats”) in order to pass the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA). The NLRA was a landmark national legislation passed in 1935 that protected employees’ rights to form unions. At the time, most people who worked on farms and in households as domestic servants were black. To win the southern vote, those two groups—farmworkers and domestic workers (housekeepers, cooks, nannies)—were explicitly written out of the law.

State Supreme Court Justice Richard McNally sided with the Farm Bureau, agreeing that changes to the state’s labor laws should be decided by the legislature, not the courts, the Albany Times Union reports. He added that the NYCLU failed to demonstrate that elements of the state’s fair labor laws are discriminatory, or that farmworkers are entitled to constitutional protections.

“Because of an outdated law, the people we rely on for the food in our kitchens are condemned to poverty, abuse and even death,” said the NYCLU’s lead counsel on the case, Erin Beth Harrist, in a press release. “We will appeal this ruling and continue to fight this law, which violates our constitution and our state’s commitment to human rights.”