At first blush, nothing was especially remarkable about the workers’ compensation claims of chile picker Maria Aguirre and dairy worker and herdsman Noe Rodriguez, claims that would have the effect of extinguishing the Farm-Ranch workers exclusion last June in Rodriguez v. Brand West Dairy, 378 P.3d 13 (NM 2016). Aguirre slipped in a field and broke her wrist while picking chiles. Rodriguez was pushed up against a door and “head-butted” by a cow. Each injury would almost certainly have been compensable under general principles of workers’ compensation law in that they arose “by accident arising out of and in the course of employment.” Neither claim was accepted as compensable during early-stage, administrative claims processing, however. Certain categories of agricultural workers had always been denied coverage under the New Mexico workers’ compensation law. Indeed, the exclusion is currently in effect in seventeen states. In most of these states, employers take on workers’ compensation coverage voluntarily, and many larger employers immunize themselves from tort liability, the immunity being available only to employers covered by a workers’ compensation statute. The claims eventually became noteworthy because of how the New Mexico Supreme Court analyzed them.
The U.S. Constitution gives state legislatures broad latitude to enact laws treating similarly situated individuals differently. Generally, if a state legislature has a rational basis for treating workers differently from the general population, or for treating one group of workers differently from another group, the legislation creating the differing treatment will be upheld provided it is both solely economic and rationally related to a legitimate state interest. The burden is on the plaintiff to prove that it is neither. This lowest, rational-basis judicial scrutiny contrasts with intermediate scrutiny, which is reserved for laws creating sex-based classifications or for legal restrictions based on illegitimacy. When intermediate scrutiny is triggered, the burden is on the state to show that the law or policy being challenged furthers an important government interest by methods substantially related to that interest. The most in-depth judicial review is termed strict scrutiny and is triggered when a fundamental constitutional right is infringed, or when state action applies to a suspect classification, such as race or national origin. A good deal of criticism has been leveled at this taxonomy because it effectively limits review of most legislative action creating classifications of persons to a rational basis review that tends to summarily uphold the legislative action.