A federal judge in Georgia has blocked the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) from enforcing a rule in Indiana and 16 other states that would prevent agricultural employers from retaliating against migrant workers with H-2A visas for joining labor unions.
The decision was made by U.S. District Judge Lisa Godbey Wood, who found the rule unconstitutional because it conflicted with the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) by granting collective bargaining rights to farmworkers, a right that Congress has not legislated for under the H-2A program.
Agricultural laborers are explicitly excluded from the law’s definition of “employee” and are not entitled to collective bargaining rights, according to Wood.
“By implementing the final rule, the DOL has exceeded the general authority constitutionally afforded to agencies,” Wood wrote in the 38-page decision.
Quoting a line from the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2001 opinion in Alexander v. Sandoval, Wood wrote, “’Agencies may play the sorcerer’s apprentice but not the sorcerer himself.’ The final rule is an attempt by the DOL to play the sorcerer. The DOL may assist Congress, but may not become Congress.”
The 600-page rule, officially called “Improving Protections for Workers in Temporary Agricultural Employment in the United States,” was issued by the DOL in April but did not go into effect until June.
When the rule was introduced by the DOL in April, Hoosier Ag Today spoke with Chuck Conner, President and CEO of the National Council of Farmer Cooperatives (NCFC), who called the rule “problematic”.
“Pitting individual farmers out there against Union organizers and basically anybody else that [farm workers] would like to bring on our farms and ranches to oversee these farm operations is just not the direction we should be going at this point,” said Conner. “Our farmers do not need any burden placed upon them in these kind of times.”
In April, Conner said he had been pushing for farm labor reform, but disagreed completely with how the Biden administration was handling the issue.
“Our hope and our goal for labor reform is to increase access to workers for American agriculture. It’s not to go down the path of these proposed Biden rules that are now going final, which is basically to give workers unprecedented rights to disrupt farm production on these farms and ranches,” said Conner. “Our goal is quite the opposite. We want these farms and ranchers to have full access to as much labor as they need to keep food production in this country and not overseas somewhere.”
In addition to Indiana, the other 16 states that had sued the DOL over the initial rule were: Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, Louisiana, Arkansas, Kansas, Idaho, Iowa, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia.
CLICK HERE to read the 38-page decision written by U.S. District Judge Lisa Godbey Wood.
