Tag: aewr

Judge Sets Hearing Date For Challenge to Adverse Effect Wage Rate

| Press Release, Uncategorized

June 2 2025

For Immediate Release

Contact:       Michael Marsh, President and CEO

                        (202) 629-9320

Judge Sets Hearing Date For Challenge to Adverse Effect Wage Rate

(Arlington, VA) A Federal U.S. District judge in the Middle District of Florida has decided that the next step in a yearslong battle for farmers’ and ranchers’ rights to make their own business decisions can take place. After months of delay and dragging-on, U.S. District Court Judge Charlene Honeywell set a date for oral arguments in the National Council of Agricultural Employers’ (NCAE) Motion for Summary Judgment challenging the legality of the Department of Labor’s (DOL) Adverse Effect Wage Rate (AEWR).

After receiving a third request from the Department of Justice (DOJ) for the court to issue a 90-day stay in the Council’s litigation, Judge Honeywell denied the stay. The Court noted that the “latest motion fails to demonstrate that an additional stay is appropriate at this time, particularly in light of plaintiffs’ allegations of ongoing harm.” NCAE’s challenge of this unlawful rule began in April 2023 following the Biden Administration’s promulgation of the AEWR Final Rule in February 2023.

“We are grateful to the court for disallowing unending delay tactics,” stated Michael Marsh, NCAE’s President and CEO. “America’s agricultural community is being forced to foot-the-bill of this illegal wage rate with each passing pay period. America’s farmers and ranchers need relief and need it now.”

Oral arguments on NCAE’s Motion for Summary Judgment on the AEWR rule are now scheduled to take place on Tuesday, July 1, 2025, in Federal District Court in Tampa.

“The overzealous Biden Administration’s DOL forced America’s farm and ranch families to pay this unlawful wage for years, costing them billions as our food production moves offshore at an alarming rate,” stated Marsh. “If the grocery-buying public wishes to find American-grown food on their grocery shelves, this regulation must be stopped. The deference the Court afforded the DOL in finding the regulation could not be enjoined, was overruled by the Supreme Court last term. We are hopeful that the new Administration will see the common-sense arguments made by the Council and our colleagues and undo this illegal wage-setting policy promulgated by Washington bureaucrats.”
NCAE is the national trade association focusing on agricultural labor issues from the employer’s viewpoint.

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NCAE Advocates to Cut Red Tape Crippling America’s Agricultural Community

| Press Release, Uncategorized

May 23, 2025

For Immediate Release

Contact:       Michael Marsh, President and CEO

                        (202) 629-9320

NCAE Advocates to Cut Red Tape Crippling America’s Agricultural Community

(Arlington, VA) The Department of Justice’s (DOJ) Antitrust Division’s Anticompetitive Regulations Task Force is seeking suggestions to unearth and unwind anticompetitive regulations. The National Council of Agricultural Employers (NCAE) answered that call, submitting comments on seven regulatory roadblocks which are impeding America’s farming and ranching communities’ ability to achieve and sustain the American dream.

“Over the past four years, America’s farm and ranch families have found themselves drowning in a turbulent regulatory sea,” wrote Michael Marsh, NCAE’s President and CEO. “Many of these were promulgated by federal regulators who were seduced by special interest groups which aim to weaken American families, businesses and the American economy.”

“As a result,” Marsh explained, “America’s family farms and ranches—the backbone of rural America—are vanishing at an increasing rate. Likewise, finding American-grown food on grocery store shelves is becoming increasingly difficult”

In the Task Force’s statement soliciting stakeholder comments, the Task Force explained that consistent with President Trump’s Executive Order 14192 and 14219 and longstanding Department practice, “the Antitrust Division will support federal agencies’ deregulatory initiatives by sharing its market expertise on regulations that pose the greatest barriers to economic growth.” The Task Force explains that the phenomenon known as “regulatory capture” occurs when agencies are “captured” by special interest groups and promulgate regulations that harm private enterprise, small business, and American entrepreneurship. The Task Force explained that “when regulations serve the few and impose undue burdens on small businesses, private enterprise, and entrepreneurs, they also harm competition and ultimately hurt American consumers, workers, and businesses.”

“Over the past four years,” noted Marsh, “the disdainful tenor used throughout the promulgation of many of these regulations make it clear that their promulgation is a direct result of the regulatory capture as described in the Task Force’s statement.”

In response to the solicitation for feedback, NCAE advocated for the DOJ Task Force to examine, investigate and advocate for rescission or withdrawal seven overburdensome, arbitrary, capricious and economically unsound regulations that target and harm America’s agricultural community. Those regulations include the Department of Labor’s (DOL) Adverse Effect Wage Rate (AEWR), the DOL Worker Protection Rule, the DOL H-2A Program Rule, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Asylum Fee Rule, the DHS Worker Protection Rule, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) Walkaround Rule and the OSHA Heat Rule.

“Rather than resulting in any benefit to American farmers and ranchers, American workers, or American taxpayers, the point of the regulations seems merely to create more paperwork for employers to file and federal employees to push from desk to desk, while simultaneously increasing compliance costs, reducing efficiency, and crippling America’s competitiveness in the marketplace.

“For American agriculture to remain competitive at home and in foreign markets,” wrote NCAE, “this cannot continue.”

NCAE is the national trade association focusing on agricultural labor issues from the employer’s viewpoint.

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NCAE Challenges Adverse Effect Wage Rate Rule

| H-2A Visa Program Press Release, Press Release

April 24, 2023

(Washington, D.C.)

The National Council of Agricultural Employers (NCAE) filed a Motion for Preliminary Injunction against the Department of Labor’s (DOL) new Adverse Effect Wage Rate (AEWR) regulation, Friday evening, April 21, 2023.  The lawsuit alleges that the Secretary’s action in developing the regulation was arbitrary and capricious and an abuse of the Secretary’s discretion.   

“This regulation continues the DOL’s abusive practice of mandating minimum wages farmers and ranchers must pay under the Temporary H-2A Agricultural Program completely disconnected from the market for agricultural labor anywhere on the planet,” noted Michael Marsh, President and CEO of NCAE.  “Not only does the rule continue to misuse the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Farm Labor Survey (FLS) to establish wage rates, but it also piles on farm and ranch families by requiring nonfarm wages drawn from the Bureau of Labor and Statistics (BLS) for simple, routine, on farm activities, jobs which have been performed on American farms and ranches for generations.  Some farmworker wages will more than double under this new rule forcing family operations out of business.  And, of course, these mandated minimum wages impact all farm wages, whether employers use the program or not.”

The DOL received comments on this rulemaking from family farms and ranches located across the country raising concerns regarding the madness of the Secretary’s approach.  Commenters pointed out that the DOL’s regulations and its continued misuse of survey instruments not designed to capture actual agricultural wage rates were forcing America’s food production to flee to overseas competitors.  As a result of DOL’s ignoring the pleas of U.S. legacy farming operations, today more than 60% of the fresh fruit and more than 35% of the fresh vegetables consumed in the U.S. are being produced by overseas competitors.  Farm and ranch families, the Small Business Administration, economists, and others had warned the Secretary that such irresponsible action was putting America’s food security at risk—a concern seemingly ignored by the Secretary.

“NCAE has repeatedly petitioned the Secretaries of Labor to make a determination of an adverse effect to the domestic workforce due to the employment of H-2A workers prior to mandating devastating AEWRs.  Sadly, for America, the DOL has turned its back on commonsense and the American people.  The economic evidence overwhelmingly supports our cause and the fact that DOL’s estimates of cost impact are short by hundreds of millions, if not ultimately, billions of dollars!  These are incredible errors,” said Marsh.  “Having been slammed face first into the dirt by the Executive Branch, NCAE and our farm and ranch family members had no other choice than to turn to the Judiciary hoping the Court will hear and recognize the importance of our pleas for relief.”

The legal challenge is being brought in Federal District Court in Tampa, Florida, on behalf of NCAE and several named NCAE member plaintiffs.

NCAE is the national trade association focusing on agricultural labor issues from the employer’s viewpoint.

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NCAE Concerned Over New Wage Rule

| H-2A Visa Program Press Release, Press Release

February 28, 2023

(Washington, D.C.)

The National Council of Agricultural Employers (NCAE) raised grave concern over the issuance of a new wage rule for use in the H-2A Temporary Agricultural Worker Program published this morning. The regulation, which began its rulemaking journey in July 2019 during the Trump Administration, found its way to publication in the Federal Register today.


The new regulation would not only continue the Department of Labor’s (DOL) historic misuse of the USDA’s Farm Labor Survey to manufacture wage rates in the H-2A Program disconnected from the market for agricultural labor in the United States but also injects additional new wage rates into the program similarly disconnected from agriculture to compensate some workers for routine on-farm chores. The net effect of this new wage rule will push more of America’s food production offshore to foreign competition making American families even more dependent on foreign countries for food. Today more than 60% of the fresh fruit and more than 35% of the fresh vegetables consumed in the United States are produced offshore.


“The Department of Labor’s new wage rule is a disaster for American consumers and the farm and ranch families who toil every day to deliver bounty harvested from their legacy operations,” said Michael Marsh, President and CEO of the National Council of Agricultural Employers. “The Department is required by statute to establish wage rates under the H-2A Program that will not adversely effect the wages and working conditions of domestic workers similarly employed. This rule seeks to do that by throwing U.S. farm and ranch families under the bus!”


The National Council of Agricultural Employers has repeatedly petitioned Secretaries of the Department of Labor to hold hearings on the economics of this regulatory scheme but those petitions to the American government have been ignored. The Department of Agriculture has indicated that, “The Farm Labor Survey has been conducted for more than 80 years, using basically the same survey methods. It was not designed to be used as a source of wage rates for a guest worker program. Rather, it provides an accurate count of the numbers of persons employed in agriculture and the average wage rate across all skill levels and occupations.”


“With this new rule, American consumers can be confident in one thing, they will be more likely to find tomatoes in their grocery store grown in Mexico, than those grown in Florida, California, or Michigan. Similarly, consumers can count on finding blueberries, apples, and strawberries produced in Canada, but few selections grown in Georgia, New York, or Washington,” said Marsh. “A country forced to rely on others for its sustenance has forfeited a key element of its national security. America expects and deserves better than this!”


NCAE is working with legal counsel, economists, and Members of Congress to determine options and next steps forward.


NCAE is the national trade association focusing on agricultural labor issues from the employer’s viewpoint.
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