Comite de Apoyo a los Trabajadores Agricolas (CATA) v. U.S. Dept. of Labor

• Citation: 995 F.2d 510
• Decision Date: 09 June 1993
• Docket Number: No. 92-2323,92-2323
• Parties: 125 Lab.Cas. P 35,830 COMITE DE APOYO A LOS TRABAJADORES AGRICOLAS (CATA), Julio Aponte-Galarza, Nelson Ayala, Geraldo Camacho, William Carabillo, Santiago Castillo, Carlos Collazo-Baez, Pablo Colon-Perez, Luis A. Delgado, Luis M. Fuentes, Wilson Maldonado, Carmelo Medina, Carlos Montero, Jose L. Palau-Torres, Jorge Ramirez, Reyes Ramirez, Ramon Ramirez-Muniz, Candido Ramos, Jose Luis Rodriguez, Jose Serano, Hermitano Soto, Antonio Toro-Flores, Randy Buckley, Dean Clarke, Plaintiffs-Appellants, v. UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF LABOR; William E. Brock, Secretary of the United States Department of Labor; William Haltigan, Regional Administrator of Region III, Employment and Training Administration, Defendants-Appellees, and Hepburn Orchards, Incorporated; Fairview Orchards Associates, Defendants. Frederick County Fruit Growers' Association, Incorporated, Amicus Curiae.
• Court: United States Courts of Appeals. United States Court of Appeals (4th Circuit)

Page 510

995 F.2d 510

125 Lab.Cas. P 35,830

COMITE DE APOYO A LOS TRABAJADORES AGRICOLAS (CATA), Julio Aponte-Galarza, Nelson Ayala, Geraldo Camacho, William Carabillo, Santiago Castillo, Carlos Collazo-Baez, Pablo Colon-Perez, Luis A. Delgado, Luis M. Fuentes, Wilson Maldonado, Carmelo Medina, Carlos Montero, Jose L Palau-Torres, Jorge Ramirez, Reyes Ramirez, Ramon Ramirez-Muniz, Candido Ramos, Jose Luis Rodriguez, Jose Serano, Hermitano Soto, Antonio Toro-Flores, Randy Buckley Dean Clarke, Plaintiffs-Appellants, v. UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF LABOR; William E. Brock Secretary of the United States Department of Labor; William Haltigan, Regional Administrator of Region III, Employment and Training Administration, Defendants-Appellees and Hepburn Orchards, Incorporated; Fairview Orchards Associates, Defendants. Frederick County Fruit Growers' Association, Incorporated, Amicus Curiae.

No. 92-2323.

United States Court of Appeals, Fourth Circuit.

Argued March 29, 1993.

Decided June 9, 1993.

Garry G. Geffert, Migrant Legal Action Program, Inc., Washington, DC, argued (Gregory S. Schell, Florida Rural Legal Services, Inc., Belle Glade, FL, Shelley David, Farmworker Justice Fund, Inc., Washington, DC, on brief), for appellants.

John Samuel Koppel, Civil Div., U.S. Dept. of Justice, Washington, DC, argued (Stuart M. Gerson, Asst. Atty. Gen., Richard D. Bennett, U.S. Atty., Michael Jay Singer, Civil Div., U.S. Dept. of Justice, Washington, DC, on brief), for appellees.

Thomas E. Wilson, Christopher A. Weals, Seyfarth, Shaw, Fairweather & Geraldson, Washington, DC, for amicus curiae.

Before WIDENER and WILKINSON, Circuit Judges, and HILTON, United States District Judge for the Eastern District of Virginia, sitting by designation.

OPINION

WILKINSON, Circuit Judge:

The question here is whether plaintiffs have standing to seek a declaratory judgment when the party that would be adversely affected by that judgment is not present in the case. Plaintiffs seek a declaratory judgment that the Department of Labor erred in approving wages they received for agricultural labor in 1986. The grower that employed plaintiffs in 1986 is not a party to this case; plaintiffs hope to use a declaration that their wages were impermissibly low to obtain backpay from the grower in a separate arbitration proceeding. We hold that plaintiffs do not have standing, because the grower would not be bound by a judgment rendered in its absence. Any opinion we might issue would thus be purely advisory in the arbitration proceeding. Article III forbids us to enter such a judgment.

Plaintiffs additionally seek a prospective declaration that the wage-correlation methodology which the Department of Labor devised for this case is invalid. We hold that plaintiffs lack standing to seek this relief too, because the threat that DOL will again apply the new methodology to wages earned by plaintiffs is not sufficiently "real and immediate." Accordingly, we affirm the district court's judgment of dismissal.

I.

The United States Employment Service is a cooperative federal-state employment system established under the Wagner-Peyser Act of 1933, codified at 29 U.S.C. §§ 49 et seq. The USES helps agricultural employers in one state find agricultural workers in another state when the local labor supply is lacking. To use this service, the employer must make an offer that matches the "prevailing wages ... among similarly employed agricultural workers in the area of intended employment." 20 C.F.R. § 653.501(d)(4). This rule prevents the USES from serving as a source of cheap labor, which would depress local wages.

To determine the "prevailing wage" in an "area of intended employment," the Department of Labor applies a formula laid out in its Employment Training Administration Handbook No. 385. First, DOL marks out areas of agricultural employment and surveys laborers in that area to see what they were paid in the previous year for harvesting a given crop. DOL then identifies the most common method of payment for the crop in question: i.e., piece rate or hourly rate. The median wage in that most common method of payment becomes the prevailing wage rate ("PWR") for the region.

Occasionally, however, a grower makes an USES offer in a different method of payment than the PWR. In the summer of 1986, two western Maryland orchards--Hepburn Orchards, Inc. and Fairview Orchards Associates--made USES offers of $3.50 per hour for "orchard work." "Orchard work" included picking apples; the PWR for apple-picking in 1985 had been a piece rate. DOL thus confronted the problem of correlating a piece rate PWR to an hourly rate USES offer.

Faced with a tight deadline, DOL approved the $3.50 per hour offers. On July 24, 1986, the Comite de Apoyo a los Trabajadores Agricolas, along with twenty-three individual plaintiffs, filed this complaint against DOL and the two orchards, claiming that the approved wage was too low. The Comite (or "CATA") is a New Jersey-based organization consisting of approximately 2000 migrant farmworkers. The complaint stated that members of CATA were "presently employed, ha[d] been employed, and expect[ed] to be employed at Defendant Orchards," and that the individual plaintiffs were "current, past or potential employees of the Defendant Orchards." The complaint sought a declaratory judgment that the USES offers violated 20 C.F.R. § 653.501(d)(4), plus an injunction forbidding DOL to approve the offers.

A flurry of motions ensued. First, the district court granted Hepburn's motion to be dismissed, because none of the plaintiffs had worked for Hepburn during the 1986 season. The court also dismissed Fairview, because plaintiffs' labor contracts with Fairview required wage disputes to be resolved through arbitration. Finally, the court denied plaintiffs' motion for a preliminary injunction against DOL approval, reasoning that the wage rate calculations were "complex, and best left to the expertise of the Department of Labor."

In May 1987, DOL confessed that it had erred in approving the $3.50 per hour wage, and was granted a remand so that it could develop a wage-correlation methodology suitable for the unique facts of this case. On April 4, 1988, DOL submitted its new formula to the court. Under the new formula, DOL would initially compute the PWR for the given crop in the given region, just as it had before. When the PWR was a piece rate and the USES offer was an hourly wage, however, DOL would convert the PWR to an hourly earnings rate and calculate the average of these hourly rates over the last three years. This average would then be discounted by twenty percent, to account for the incentive effect of piece-rate compensation. Finally, when a job description such as "orchard work" consisted of different tasks, DOL would combine the discounted hourly rates for each task proportionally. This composite discounted average hourly rate would serve as the comparison figure for the USES offer in question.

Applying this new methodology, the DOL approved an "orchard work" wage for 1986 of $3.84 per hour. Plaintiffs amended their complaint to challenge the DOL's new wage-correlation methodology. Both sides moved for summary judgment.

In May 1990, the magistrate judge issued a Report and Recommendation advising the district court to award summary judgment to the plaintiffs. The judge first advised that plaintiffs had standing to challenge the application of the new methodology to Fairview's and Hepburn's 1986 offers, as well as the application of the new methodology to any future USES offers. On the merits of plaintiffs' challenge, the judge advised that the twenty percent discount was unreasonable.

In August 1992, the district court rejected this recommendation. The court agreed that plaintiffs had standing to challenge the application of the new methodology to their 1986 wages, but disagreed that they had standing to challenge its application to future USES offers. The court found it too unlikely that DOL would again use the same methodology to approve wages paid to plaintiffs. On the merits, the court ruled that the twenty percent discount was a reasonable interpretation of the Wagner-Peyser Act, and was consistent with the other regulations promulgated thereunder.

The district court accordingly awarded summary judgment to DOL. Plaintiffs appeal.

II.

Plaintiffs challenge DOL's new wage-correlation methodology, both as applied to their 1986 wages and as applied to future USES offers. We hold that plaintiffs lack standing to challenge either application of the methodology. In Part A, we explain why plaintiffs lack standing to challenge the 1986 application of the new methodology. In Part B, we explain why they lack standing to challenge future applications of the same.

A.

The law of standing derives from Article III of the Constitution, which limits federal jurisdiction to actual "Cases" or "Controversies." To establish such a Case or Controversy, "[a] plaintiff must allege personal injury fairly traceable to the defendant's allegedly unlawful conduct and likely to be redressed by the requested relief." Allen v. Wright, 468 U.S. 737, 751, 104 S.Ct. 3315, 3324, 82 L.Ed.2d 556 (1984). These three requirements--personal injury, causation, and redressability--promote important adjudicative functions. First, they require each litigant to have a real stake in the outcome of the case. Thus they "assure that concrete adverseness which sharpens the presentation of issues," Baker v. Carr, 369 U.S. 186, 204, 82 S.Ct. 691, 703, 7 L.Ed.2d 663 (1962); this sharpened presentation in turn helps reduce the risk of an erroneous or poorly thought-out decision. Second, they forbid the litigants to pose hypothetical questions for the court to resolve. Thus they permit the concentration of scarce judicial resources on disputes of genuine remedial consequence; this concentration again helps reduce the risk of error. Third, they require the plaintiff to plead more...