A pro bono team of WilmerHale lawyers achieved a significant victory for United Farm Workers (UFW) and the UFW Foundation when Judge Dale A. Drozd of the Eastern District of California granted our clients’ motion for summary judgment and vacated a rule that threatened to reduce the wages of hundreds of thousands of farmworkers.

This follows an earlier victory where the team enjoined the administration from implementing the rule, which would have frozen farmworkers wages for two years and then slowed wage increases going forward. Absent the injunction and final order, the rule would have disadvantaged more than 300,000 farmworkers across the country and resulted in aggregate wage losses to farmworkers of more than $500 million.

Earlier during the course of litigation, the team enjoined the administration on behalf of UFW against USDA’s decision in September 2020 to cancel the Farm Labor Survey, a tool used by USDA for decades to collect detailed data on farmworkers and the agricultural labor market.

The WilmerHale team representing UFW and the UFW Foundation includes Mark Selwyn, Gregory Lantier, Derek Woodman, Taylor Gooch, Phillip Takhar and Taryn McCarthy and former WilmerHale attorneys Rachel Jacobson, Nick Werle and Tico Almeida.