AG Coleman Joins Kentucky Farmers in Legal Challenge Against Biden’s Protections for Foreign Farmworkers
Last week, seven Kentucky farmers sued the US Department of Labor to prohibit new federal protections for foreign farmworkers entering the US on H2-A temporary visas.
On Monday, Kentucky Attorney General Russell Coleman joined them, stating that the new regulation will allow Kentucky farmworkers to unionize.
According to a press statement from Coleman’s office, Republican attorneys general from Alabama, Ohio, and West Virginia are also preparing to intervene to prevent the new regulation.
A federal judge in Georgia earlier this year barred the Biden administration from applying the rule in 17 additional states.
The regulation, which was announced in April, increases seasonal worker safeguards, including those against employer retaliation, dangerous working conditions, and illegal recruitment activities. Worker-transportation vans must have seat belts.
Coleman, a Republican, claimed that the new legislation “would force Kentucky farmers to allow temporary foreign-migrant workers to form unions and engage in collective bargaining.” It will impose disproportionate additional bureaucratic requirements on Kentucky agricultural employers, who are already struggling to make ends meet.
Rural Migration News reports that the Labor Department issued H2-A visas to 378,000 temporary workers, the majority of whom were from Mexico, in fiscal year 2023. Nearly 8,000 temporary laborers were employed in Kentucky.
The plaintiffs in the lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court of Kentucky’s Eastern District, include organizations that assist growers in navigating the H2-A process, such as the Lexington-based Agriculture Workforce Management Association, which claims to be “owned and managed by agricultural employers.”
They argue that without congressional authorization, the Labor Department lacks the authority to confer “certain new ‘rights’ on foreign agricultural workers who are temporarily employed in the United States on H-2A visas, as well as on American agricultural workers deemed to be engaged in ‘corresponding employment’ with the H-2A workers.”
Federal law compels the Labor Department to ensure that U.S. workers will not lose their jobs or earnings to foreign workers accepted on temporary visas.
U.S. Labor Secretary Julie Su announced the regulation in a California vineyard, saying it “is meant to give H2-A workers more ability to advocate for themselves, to speak up when they experience labor law abuses.”
The law, said Coleman, “will force new burdens on our growers, making it harder to get their products to market and raising costs on families at the grocery store.”
Joe Bilby, the attorney who initiated the lawsuit, is a former general counsel for the Kentucky Department of Agriculture.