MENDOCINO CO., 8/30/26 — Mendocino County growers have federal approval to fill 130 wine-grape jobs this season with farmworkers brought in from abroad on temporary visas. All but two of those jobs pay $16.90 an hour. Last season, the federal floor for that work was $19.97.
On Tuesday, a federal judge ruled that the government broke the law when it moved that floor. He left the lower rate standing.
U.S. District Judge Kirk E. Sherriff found that the U.S. Department of Labor acted unlawfully when it rewrote minimum wages for farmworkers on H-2A visas, the federal program that lets American growers hire foreign workers for seasonal jobs. Part of what the new rule does is let a grower pay a visa worker less than a U.S. worker doing the same job on the same farm.
Sherriff found four pieces of the rule arbitrary and said the Labor Department pushed most of them through without the public comment federal law requires. He did not throw the rule out. Doing that would leave the H-2A program with no federal wage rates at all, which is what both sides asked him to avoid.
So growers can keep paying the lower rates the government told them to pay. What changed Tuesday is that some of that money may eventually have to be paid back.
Sherriff gave the Labor Department seven days — until Wednesday — to tell state agencies, employers and the public that employers using H-2A labor “may be required to make wage adjustment payments.” Once that notice goes out, every hour worked at a rate later found too low becomes an hour a grower may owe on.
That backpay would not go only to workers who came here on visas. The order covers “qualifying H-2A workers and U.S. farmworkers in corresponding employment” — domestic workers doing the same job for the same employer under the same job order.
Two prices for the same job
The rule sets two wage floors for the same work: one for U.S. farmworkers, and one for H-2A workers that is $3.07 an hour lower in California.
The reason is housing. Growers must house their H-2A workers, and the Labor Department decided lodging is a form of pay, so it subtracted the cost of a bed from the visa worker’s hourly rate — a bed it priced as though two workers share each bedroom of a four-bedroom house.
Sherriff found that reasoning wrong on its face, and the reason is the worker standing in the next row.
Federal regulation requires a grower to provide free housing to H-2A workers and to U.S. farmworkers doing the same job who cannot get home at the end of the day. Both workers get the bed. Only one of them gets it deducted.
“By applying the housing adjustment only to H-2A workers,” Sherriff wrote, the rule “ensures that H-2A workers are cheaper than those U.S. farmworkers who are not reasonably able to return to their residence within the same day. This will, in turn, incentivize agricultural employers to hire H-2A workers over those U.S. farmworkers.”
The department made “a clear error of judgment,” he wrote, in concluding that free housing created a gap between all H-2A workers and all U.S. farmworkers. He also found the deduction collides with the regulation requiring the housing to be free, since a grower who houses a worker and then deducts the rent from that worker’s wage has not provided the housing for free.
What it means in Mendocino County
On Mendocino County’s vineyard picking jobs, that split never appears. The state minimum wage swallowed it.
Federal job-order records reviewed by The Voice show four approved H-2A contracts at Mendocino County worksites as of Thursday, covering 250 jobs. Most of the vineyard work is in Anderson Valley.
Anderson Vineyards Inc. is approved for 105 vineyard jobs in Philo at $16.90 an hour through Sept. 30. MCF4 Solutions LLC, a Santa Rosa labor contractor, has two approved contracts for Ukiah worksites: 23 field workers at $16.90, and two crew leaders and drivers at $19.92. The fourth contract is not vineyard work — 120 landscaping jobs for Redwood Empire Reforestation in Redwood Valley.
Both federal floors for entry-level vineyard work fall below California’s minimum wage, so the state minimum catches everyone. The visa worker and the local worker in an Anderson Valley row earn the same $16.90. Both earn less than the same job paid last year.
How the floor moved
The H-2A wage rules exist to keep the temporary foreign-worker program from dragging down wages for U.S. farmworkers. Employers must pay whichever is highest: the federal farm wage rate, a local prevailing wage, a union rate or the state minimum.
For years in California, the federal rate was highest. In 2025, it was $19.97 an hour, one number for everyone.
The rule the Sherriff reviewed replaced that with skill tiers, and the Labor Department expected 92% of H-2A jobs to land in the entry tier. Then it applied the housing deduction on top. Entry-tier fieldwork came out at $16.59 for U.S. workers and $13.52 for H-2A workers.
Neither figure reaches California’s minimum wage, which has been $16.90 since Jan. 1. So the state minimum became the floor, which is why $16.90 keeps appearing on Mendocino job orders.
That is the season’s arithmetic for an entry-level worker: $19.97 last year, $16.90 now, about $123 less over a 40-hour week.
Across the county’s 130 wine-grape jobs, that difference runs about $16,000 a week. Whether any of it comes back is unknown. The Labor Department has not written the replacement rates, and nothing in Sherriff’s order says the new ones have to reach last year’s number.
Growers did not set the federal floor. They filed their orders at the rates the government gave them.
What the judge found
The dispute began with a real problem for the Labor Department. On Aug. 11, 2025, the U.S. Department of Agriculture discontinued the Farm Labor Survey, the data behind H-2A wages, and the department still faced a year-end deadline to publish rates. Sherriff found that gave the government good cause to pick a new data source in a hurry, without public comment.
The problem was everything else. The skill tiers, the housing adjustment and a rule assigning a worker to whichever occupation takes up the majority of their time were “insufficiently connected to the specific need for a new data source,” Sherriff wrote. Those pieces should have gone through public comment.
He also rejected the government’s argument that immigration enforcement had created a farm labor shortage that justified lower wages. The H-2A program has no cap, he noted, so a grower short of hands could bring in more visa workers at the old, higher rate. That argument, Sherriff wrote, “is not economically rational.”
He found the government had not shown a widespread shortage in the first place, and pointed to the industry’s own numbers: farm net income rose from $127.8 billion in 2024 to $179.8 billion in 2025, one of the most profitable years on record.
Sherriff denied a United Farm Workers request to freeze the rule in May, which is why the lower rates governed the whole 2026 season. He has kept the case open, ordered the department to write a new wage methodology “promptly,” and set a status report for about Sept. 9.
What’s not settled
No one knows what the replacement wage will be, or how much backpay will be owed. The Labor Department has to write the new rates before anyone can do the subtraction, and Sherriff reserved the backpay question for later briefing.
There is also a local wrinkle. Employers must pay a surveyed local prevailing wage when it runs higher than everything else, and the North Coast has historically had one for vineyard work. A rate of $19.65 an hour has circulated since 2022. Those figures come from voluntary state surveys that no one is required to run. Whether a current determination still covers Mendocino County is a question for the California Employment Development Department.
No further filings had appeared on the case docket as of Saturday afternoon, and Sherriff’s order does not say what a worker on the job now should do to preserve a claim.
Mendocino’s vineyard contracts run into October. That leaves the rest of the season under a wage rule a judge has already found unlawful.
What the rate should have been, nobody can say until the Labor Department writes the new one.