FRANKFORT, KY– Attorney General Russell Coleman announced today he is leading a multistate group of attorneys general in challenging a Biden-Harris Administration rule that would target Kentucky farmers.
General Coleman was joined by attorneys general from Alabama, Ohio and West Virginia to support farmers and oppose the U.S. Department of Labor’s rule that would create unlawful labor burdens on the temporary agriculture worker program known as the H-2A Visa Program.
The attorneys general filed a motion to intervene in a lawsuit brought by Kentucky farmers and associations that work with farmers in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Kentucky.
Since it was created in 1986, the H-2A Visa Program has allowed farmers to hire foreign workers on a temporary basis when they are unable to find available Americans to fill the jobs. The Biden-Harris Administration’s new regulation would force Kentucky farmers to allow temporary foreign-migrant workers to form a union and engage in collective bargaining. It would add excessive new bureaucratic burdens to Kentucky agricultural employers, who are already struggling to make ends meet.
“Kentucky’s farmers are some of the best in the world. But the unlawful and unnecessary rules from the Biden-Harris Administration will force new burdens on our growers, making it harder to get their products to market and raising costs on families at the grocery store,” said Attorney General Russell Coleman. “This Administration should help Kentucky farmers during the harvest season, not try to run them out of business.”
Earlier this year, a Georgia farm and 17 states challenged the rule in federal court, which agreed to temporarily block the rule from taking effect in those states. Since Kentucky was not part of that litigation, the Biden-Harris Administration is still publicly working to implement the unlawful and burdensome regulation in the Commonwealth.
"The H-2A program is already complicated and filled with challenges for farmers, and the Biden-Harris administration is only adding to the burden. I want to express my gratitude to Attorney General Russell Coleman for his unwavering support of Kentucky farmers and for being a strong ally to Kentucky agriculture," said Agriculture Commissioner Jonathan Shell.
Read the Commonwealth’s complaint.
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