California Plant Nursery Pays $2.5 million in back wages

Los Angeles, CAAltman Specialty Plants LLC has agreed to pay its workers $2.5 million in back wages and about $1 million in civil money penalties after a U.S. Department of Labor investigation determined that the largest horticultural grower in the U.S coerced workers to quit so it could dodge the H-2A temporary agricultural program’s wage and hour requirements.

California Plant Nursery Pays .5 million in back wages Altman Plants, an operator of plant nurseries in California, describes itself as a family-owned-and-operated. The DOL said that Altman forced workers to resign because it was trying to disregard the H-2A visa program’s three-fourth guarantee obligations– which is a violation of the Immigration and Nationality Act–after going through a reduction in demand. And in another complaint, the DOL determined that Altman had also violated the requirements of the H-2A visa program in connection with a 2020 H-2A certification.

Three-Fourth Guarantee

According to Law360, Altman coerced its non-H-2A workers to sign a document in which they would either quit their jobs to be employed under the new certification or decide to remain employed and be paid under the adverse effective wage rate instead of receiving the three-fourth guarantee that H-2A workers are entitled to. The guarantee means that, in every H-2A contract, employers must offer all workers 75 percent of the work hours specified in the H-2A contract based on the standard work schedule set forth in the Job Order. But the DOL said that, even with signing the document, more than 700 already-employed workers became corresponding workers — which are non-H-2A workers who do agricultural work for an H-2A employer — entitled to the same benefits as H-2A workers. However, employers aren’t required to follow the three-fourth’s requirements if workers voluntarily quit or are terminated with cause and notify the DOL’s National Processing Center in a timely manner.

Despite touting itself as the largest horticultural grower in the U.S., in June 2022 Altman said it was forced to reduce the weekly hours for the H-2A workers from 40 to 16 a week, and the hours of corresponding workers were reduced after it experienced a significant reduction in demand for labor. In its lawsuit, the DOL said that around this time, “Altman sought and obtained alleged ‘voluntary resignations’ from its H-2A workers in an attempt to be excused from its three-fourth’s guarantee obligations” but “these resignations were not voluntary because Altman coerced H-2A workers to sign them.” Employers are not allowed to seek waivers from H-2A or corresponding workers under the H-2A program. But Altman sent notices to the department’s National Processing Center about the resignations for the H-2A workers, and not for the corresponding workers. “There were problems with the timing or adequacy of these notices for over 40% of Altman’s H-2A workers, rendering the notices insufficient and invalid,” the DOL said, and Law360 reported.

Interestingly, demand for H-2A workers in California has increased. DOL found a 36 percent increase in demand for H-2A workers from 2021 to 2022. In 2023, DOL approved 27,759 H-2A certifications for California employers – a 516 percent increase over the previous decade. And over the past five years, California has ranked among the top five states utilizing H-2A workers. KERA News reported that the demand for foreign agricultural workers in late 2024 hit an all-time high, and experts say the trend could continue even though the program that brings workers into the country, H-2A, is ripe for exploitation.

A plant nursery worker in California makes about $18.25 an hour. Based on recent job posting activity on ZipRecruiter, workers in Berkeley average $22.64 an hour, and workers in Santa Clara make $21.72 an hour. According to the most recent updates, H-2A workers in California earn an Adverse Effect Wage Rate (AEWR) of $19.97 per hour, meaning that employers must pay H-2A workers at least that amount.

H-2A Temporary Agricultural Program

The H-2A program allows U.S. businesses to temporarily fill agricultural positions with foreign workers. It was created in 1986 through the Immigration Reform and Control Act. The legislation split what was then known as the H-2 program, creating H-2A visas for temporary agricultural workers and H-2B visas for non-agricultural temporary workers. DOL says that workers employed under the H-2A program can face unique risks of exploitation, due to the temporary nature of the work, frequent geographic isolation and dependence on a single employer for housing, transportation and immigration status, as well as risks of human trafficking, unsafe transportation and retaliation.

The Farmworker Protection Final Rule, announced in 2024, provides strengthened worker protections in the H-2A program to help ensure the H-2A program doesn’t have an adverse effect on the working conditions of similarly employed workers in the U.S. Greenhouse Mag wrote that, according to the DOL, the revisions in the Farmworker Protection Final Rule will help “prevent exploitation and abuse of agricultural workers and ensure that unscrupulous employers do not financially gain from their violations or contribute to economic and workforce instability by circumventing the law. This would adversely affect the wages and working conditions of workers in the United States similarly employed and undermine the Department’s ability to determine whether there are insufficient U.S. workers for proposed H-2A jobs.”

DOL H-2A Investigations and Violations

From 2018 through 2023, 84 percent of DOL’s investigations of employers found one or more violations, with the most common violations related to pay. The U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) found that H-2A violations accounted for 54 percent of back wages assessed to all agricultural employers during the 6-year period GAO reviewed. DOL has taken steps to return back wages but may not have timely access to complete contact information for workers who have returned to their home countries. DOL has not assessed how or whether it could more efficiently locate such workers. By evaluating the costs and benefits of options to better locate workers, DOL may be able to strengthen its efforts to return back wages.

DOL’s Altman investigation found that the company:

Violated the three-fourth’s obligations for both the H-2A and corresponding workers,
Failed to keep accurate records,
Failed to provide workers with hours and earning statements,

As well, Altman “caused layoffs and/or displacement of corresponding workers by significantly reducing their hours worked so that it could continue to provide hours of work to H-2A workers instead of reducing all hours of all H-2A workers to zero before it reduced a single hour to corresponding workers.”