NCAE pans H-2A rule

The Department of Labor’s recent proposed rule on H-2A reforms is shocking in its “blatant vitriol” for American farm families, the National Council of Agricultural Employers said in a news release.

“It was with a great deal of chagrin and shock that the members of NCAE received the Wage and Hour Division’s (WHD) NPRM entitled 'Improving Protections for Workers in Temporary Agriculture Employment in the United States,'” the group said in the release.

NCAE is the national trade association representing agricultural employers before regulatory agencies and Congress.

The Department of Labor proposal, according to the agency, would expand workers’ rights to invite and accept guests — including labor organizations — to employer-provided housing. Additionally, for workers not protected by the National Labor Relations Act, the proposed rule would require employers to provide a list of workers to a requesting labor organization, permit workers to designate a representative to attend any meeting between a worker and the employer where the worker reasonably believes that the meeting may lead to discipline, and prohibit employers from holding captive audience meetings unless the employer provides certain information to ensure that such meetings are not coercive.

NCAE said the proposal has a “pejorative nature and tenor” targeted at farm and ranch families.

“The language used by the agency in its announcement was stunning in both its arrogance and its disconnectedness from the reality of the DOL’s own evidence in what seems an apparent attempt to cast shade falsely and disrespectfully at farmers and ranchers,” the group said. “It was demoralizing to the women and men who struggle mightily to always comply with a complex regulatory scheme, simply to keep their legacy farm and ranch business sustainable for the next generation.”

NCAE members are diligent in following the rules, the group said.

“In fact, NCAE members and their Human Resource teams spend hundreds of hours becoming educated on agricultural employment law and best practices to maintain compliance and do this at significant expense to their operations,” the group said.

The Department of Labor’s data indicates that 5% of agricultural employers account for 95% of the violations uncovered in investigations, NCAE said.

“These 5% are not NCAE members,” the group said. “Perhaps it is in this noncompliant subset of employers that WHD feels they had license to attack near unanimously compliant employers.”

Further, the NCAE said:

“The DOL in this proposed rule seems intent on thumbing its nose at the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2021 decision in Cedar Point, et al, v. Haddid, et al, which found that a regulation providing union activist’s access to farms and ranches was an unconstitutional per se physical taking under the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments. The DOL’s NPRM is an undisguised end run around the Court and the Constitution of the United States of America.

Employees were thrilled by the Court’s action, believing they would no longer be subject to the incessant threats, coercion, intimidation, abuse, harassment, and misrepresentation, of union representatives at their place of work. DOL’s NPRM would cast aside this most critical worker protection and again make them vulnerable to these union organizing tactics to which we and our employees object.

America’s farmers, ranchers, our employees, and the American public who eats, deserve better than this.”