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.
“We are thankful that the judge in Georgia has ‘tapped the brakes’ on this issue,” says Chuck Conner, President and CEO of the National Council of Farmer Cooperatives (NCFC). He is also a native of Benton County, Indiana.
“The biggest problem is Indiana is one of 17 states where it has been halted. We would like to see the judge’s ruling applied to all 50 states,” says Conner.
“We’ve got a lot of other states that are facing tremendous uncertainty here in terms of, ‘Is DOL enforcing it? Do I have to comply now? Do I not?’ There’s just a tremendous amount of uncertainty in the farm labor marketplace right now over the state of this rule.”
Conner said he had been pushing for farm labor reform, but he disagrees with how the Biden administration has been handling the issue.
“That’s what really makes it kind of frustrating because we have a bipartisan bill in Congress—the Farm Workforce Moderation Act of 2023 (H.R. 4319)—that has been there for so long that solves all of these problems in a way that has been supported by both the farmers as well as the farm worker labor unions, and we just can’t get Congress to [pass] it. All of this DOL action and the regulations they are putting in a place would be a non-issue really if Congress would just do its job.”
The Labor Department’s 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. That rule is still in effect in 33 other states—including each of Indiana’s surrounding states of Michigan, Ohio, Kentucky, and Illinois.
“Whatever is done needs to apply across the country,” he says. “It wouldn’t be fair to have one farmer with one set of rules—and when you cross over a state line, another farmer has a totally different set of rules, so we’re looking for uniformity, but we’re also looking for the right action as well.”
Conner says the DOL’s ruling only creates more financial burdens for farmers at a time when the Biden administration, the U.S. Labor Department, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture should be focusing on helping America’s farmers.
“We have seen a very sharp downturn based upon dropping commodity prices, and so anything that happened earlier this spring, you can multiply that by 10 times just given the state of play in terms of prices and economic outlook on the farm today versus what may have been the case earlier in the year,” says Conner.
CLICK HERE to read the 38-page decision written by U.S. District Judge Lisa Godbey Wood.
