There was big news regarding the H-2A agricultural guest worker program last week.
2023 Wage Rule Rolled Back
Employers will recall the major changes that occurred with the 2023 H-2A wage rule, when use of the adverse effect wage rate (AEWR) was limited to only the “big six” standard occupational classification (SOC) codes for agriculture. All other workers brought into the country using H-2A would have to use a different, usually higher, wage rate from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. This often affected jobs such as truck drivers, supervisors, mechanics, and workers involved in construction on the farm, and it often forced employers to use separate job orders for the higher-paid workers, increasing administrative costs and complexity. Last week, as the result of an employer-led lawsuit in Louisiana, the 2023 rule was vacated for the entire country, and the U.S. Department of Labor announced that it would revert to the H-2A wage rules from 2010. Employers must still honor the terms in existing contracts, but, going forward with new contracts the restrictive “big six” job codes will not be relevant. Read more in this Fisher-Phillips blog post.
Agricultural (Farm) Labor Survey to be Discontinued
In other developing H-2A news from last week, USDA’s National Agricultural Statistical Service (NASS) announced that it will discontinue the Agricultural Labor Survey (ALS) at the end of August 2025. This long-running survey provided valuable information about farm wages for many years, but it was criticized more recently for methods that artificially inflated the AEWR wage rates, which were set using ALS data. NASS stated that information from the U.S. Department of Labor’s Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics data is sufficient for measuring farm wages.
