Labor Department suspended H-2A farmworker protection enforcement, eliminating organizing and wage safeguards for guestworkers

On June 20, 2025, the U.S. Department of Labor's Wage and Hour Division issued Field Assistance Bulletin 2025-2 directing field staff to immediately suspend enforcement of the Biden administration's April 2024 final rule, "Improving Protections for Workers in Temporary Agricultural Employment in the United States." The rule had expanded H-2A guestworkers' rights to engage in concerted activity including certain union protections, established progressive discipline and termination standards to protect against arbitrary dismissal, and required wage disclosure and payment obligations. DOL directed staff to discontinue enforcement, revert to H-2A labor-certification standards from June 27, 2024 — the day before the rule took effect — and defer case-specific questions to the National Office, stating only that it was "currently evaluating the 2024 Final Rule and considering future regulatory actions."

The suspension left more than 300,000 H-2A farmworkers without federal enforcement of those protections — workers who are by design tied to their sponsoring employer and cannot change jobs or advocate for themselves without risking loss of their visa status. The Biden rule had itself been delayed: farm-industry groups and seventeen states had obtained federal court injunctions temporarily halting parts of it, and DOL's enforcement suspension went further by abandoning enforcement outright rather than awaiting litigation resolution. Twelve days later, on July 2, 2025, DOL published a proposed rescission of parts of the rule in the Federal Register; as of mid-2026, that proposal remained pending.

Updates

2026-07-22 — ProPublica investigation revealed farm-industry strategy to overturn H-2A worker protections [3]

A ProPublica investigation published July 22, 2026 documented how farm-industry lawyers and lobbyists had mapped this strategy at a January 2025 agricultural conference in Savannah, Georgia — explicitly anticipating that the Trump administration would overturn worker protections, slow wage increases, and use recent Supreme Court decisions limiting agency rulemaking authority to challenge the program's regulatory structure. The administration separately reduced the H-2A Adverse Effect Wage Rate in 2025, a move the Economic Policy Institute projected would cost guestworkers up to 32 percent of their annual wages and save farm employers more than $2 billion per year.