The United Farm Workers is suing the Trump administration over changes to the H-2A visa program that will result in lower wages for foreign ag labor.

The lawsuit, filed Friday in the Eastern District of California, argues that the cuts to H-2A minimum wages rates will reduce pay for domestic workers as well.

The Labor Department announced in October that it was implementing a new methodology for calculating H-2A adverse effect wage rates to save employers an estimated $2.5 billion a year.

Under an interim final rule, the department changed the basis for the adverse effect wage rate from USDA’s Farm Labor Survey to the Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics survey from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

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“By DOL’s own admission, DOL engineered the IFR [interim final rule] to reduce wages paid to temporary foreign farmworkers and, in turn, U.S. workers—the precise workers whose wages and working conditions federal law protects. In short, the IFR has created the 'adverse effect' that DOL is tasked with preventing,” says the lawsuit filed on behalf of 18 individual farmworkers as well as the United Farm Workers of America and the UFW Foundation.

The lawsuit, which seeks an injunction throwing out the rule, says the Labor Department is charged “with ensuring the economic security of U.S. farmworkers. Indeed, DOL is statutorily required to ensure that the use of H-2A workers will not ‘adversely affect the wages and working conditions of workers in the United States similarly employed.’ This prohibition is critical because, unlike other foreign worker visa programs, the H-2A program has no cap on the number of work visas that may be issued thereunder. “

The rule appears to slash wages “for all, or nearly all, H-2A workers to account for the housing that employers are legally obligated to provide H-2A workers," the lawsuit says.

The lawsuit also alleges that the department violated the Administrative Procedures Act by sidestepping the normal notice-and-comment requirement without good cause. 

Farm groups welcomed the new methodology for setting the adverse effect wage rates, or AEWRs.

The National Council of Agricultural Employers said the changes would bring ag wages “back to reality.” The International Fresh Produce Association called the interim final rule “an historic step forward in creating a fairer, more predictable, and administratively workable process for setting H-2A wage rates,” 

Farm groups have long complained about annual increases in AEWRs and challenged a Biden administration rule that they said wrongly classified workers as doing certain specialized, higher-paying jobs even if they only did those jobs a fraction of the time they spent working.

The number of visas authorized under the H-2A program has grown steadily since 2012, from just 90,000 visas to nearly 385,000 in fiscal 2024.

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