A federal judge in California held on Wednesday that the Labor Department broke the law when it rewrote the wage floor for America’s seasonal farmworkers.
Today those wages are still the wages being paid in the fields, and the ruling did not set a date on which that changes.
That second sentence is the story, and it is the one almost nobody led with. The coverage of Judge Kirk E. Sherriff’s decision has read as a straightforward win for labor: the rule was arbitrary and capricious, the workers won, the administration lost. All of that is accurate. What it leaves out is the remedy. Sherriff found the Labor Department’s wage methodology unlawful and then declined to vacate it, which means the rates calculated by the tier system he just struck down are the rates a lettuce picker in Salinas is getting paid this afternoon. The workers who won have not received a raise, and no order in the case requires that they get one by any particular day.
What the Court Did, and What It Pointedly Did Not
Sherriff, who sits in the Eastern District of California and was appointed by President Biden, held that the Labor Department’s 2025 overhaul of the H-2A wage system failed basic administrative law. The department had replaced the long-standing Farm Labor Survey benchmark with a tiered structure drawn from Bureau of Labor Statistics data, splitting agricultural jobs into skill levels and setting most of them at the entry rate.
By setting the AEWRs for the vast majority of H-2A workers well below the relevant market wages through its use of the tier system, the IFR failed to reasonably consider whether its methodology could fulfill DOL’s statutory duty.
That is the core of it. The department was required to show its work on a specific statutory question and did not. Sherriff also noted, as Newsweek reported, that the rule “fails to show why hiring more H-2A workers at then-current AEWRs was not feasible,” which is the government conceding it never tested its own premise.
Then came the part that matters operationally. Citing the risk of disrupting the agricultural labor market mid-season, the judge stopped short of striking the rule from the books. Instead he remanded it, ordered the department to promptly produce a replacement methodology, required a status update within two weeks, and told the department to warn employers that wage adjustments may be owed later if the new rates land higher. HuffPost’s account captures the legal holding cleanly and, like most of the coverage, moves past the remedy in a clause.
The Rates Running Right Now Came Out of the Struck Methodology
This is where the timeline turns uncomfortable. The Labor Department published its updated adverse effect wage rates using exactly the tiered Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics approach at issue in the case, and those rates took effect on August 3 in most states. In seventeen others, including Texas, Georgia and Florida, they took effect on August 17 because those states sit under a separate preliminary injunction from Kansas v. U.S. Department of Labor. The immigration practice at Fisher Phillips walked employers through the new schedule at the time, skill tier by skill tier.
Sherriff ruled on August 26. The wage year those rates govern runs through June 2027. Anyone who wants to check what a given state is paying can pull it straight off the department’s own adverse effect wage rate tables.
So the sequence is: the department writes a methodology, publishes rates under it, gets those rates into paychecks across the country, and only then does a court say the methodology was never lawful. The rates do not roll back. They keep running while the agency that produced them decides how fast to write their replacement.
Backpay Is a Promise Written Entirely in the Conditional
The remedy that is supposed to make workers whole is contingent on three things happening in order. The Labor Department has to produce a new methodology. The rates that methodology generates have to come out higher than what was paid. And then employers have to actually pay the difference.
Every one of those steps is controlled by a party with an interest in the outcome. The department sets its own pace on the first, subject to a status report rather than a deadline. The second is a function of whatever the department chooses to build, and the department’s stated goal in this rulemaking was lower wages. The third depends on enforcement against thousands of individual growers over a season that will be long finished.
Meanwhile the money at stake is not marginal. The United Farm Workers, which brought the case alongside workers from Michigan, Georgia, California, Washington, Texas and Missouri, put the cut as high as seven dollars an hour in some states. The Economic Policy Institute found the rule pushed the effective minimum toward $13.70 an hour against an average minimum of $17.43 the previous year, and documented a second mechanism that got far less attention: a new housing deduction taken out of hourly pay. The government’s own analysis projected the transfer at more than seventeen billion dollars from workers to employers over a decade.
The Statute Is About American Workers Too
The acronym does a lot of hiding here. AEWR stands for adverse effect wage rate, and the phrase comes from the statutory condition attached to the entire guest worker program: bringing in H-2A workers must not adversely affect the wages of domestic farmworkers doing the same jobs. The wage floor is not a benefit conferred on visa holders. It is the price of admission for the growers, and it exists to stop imported labor from undercutting the people already here.
Set the floor too low and both groups fall together. That is why California Attorney General Rob Bonta formally opposed the rule when it was proposed, and it is why Sherriff’s finding was framed around the department’s failure to consider its statutory duty rather than around fairness to migrants. The administration has been notably candid about the tradeoff. As KPBS reported in March, the same government running the largest deportation push in modern history was simultaneously arguing it needed these workers, just cheaper. Labor advocates told Yahoo News the arrangement was a “recipe for abuse”, which is what you get when the workforce is deportable and the wage floor is falling.
Our View: The Remedy Is the Scandal
We think the ruling is correct on the law and close to worthless on the ground, and that the gap between those two facts is now a repeatable strategy rather than an accident.
Consider how this played out. The department issued the wage change as an interim final rule, which means it skipped the notice-and-comment period where farmworker advocates would have made these exact arguments before anyone lost a dollar. It banked the savings for growers immediately. When the case finally reached judgment more than a year later, the court declined to unwind the harm because unwinding it had become disruptive, a disruption the department created by moving fast in the first place. And the fix is now on a clock the losing party holds.
Remand without vacatur exists for real reasons, and a judge worrying about chaos in a labor market at harvest is not being unreasonable. But applied to a rule that cut hundreds of thousands of people’s pay by a quarter or more, it functions as a subsidy to the party that broke the law. The department got what it wanted, kept it through the litigation, and now controls how long it keeps it. If the penalty for an unlawful wage cut is a deadline-free instruction to try again, the rational move for any agency is to cut first and litigate later.
We have watched a version of this before. Last week the State Department paused visa appointments worldwide days after a judge voided its country list, a loss in court that produced a policy outcome the administration could live with. The pattern is the same: the ruling lands, the coverage records a defeat, and the underlying policy keeps operating in some form while the remedy is negotiated.
What should happen next is not complicated. The Labor Department should be held to a firm date, not a status update, and the court should say plainly what happens if the replacement methodology arrives late or arrives designed to produce the same numbers. Workers are owed a number and a deadline. Right now they have a finding.