On August 8, 2025, Chief Judge Miranda M. Du of the United States District Court for the District of Nevada denied all motions to dismiss and held that defendants Western Range Association (WRA) and eight member ranches must face Sherman Act claims alleging a years-long conspiracy to fix sheepherder wages and allocate labor. Alvarado v. Western Range Ass’n, No. 3:22-cv-00249-MMD-CLB (D. Nev. Aug. 8, 2025).
Plaintiff Alvarado filed suit in June 2022, on behalf of a putative class of foreign H-2A workers who had been placed for employment with ranches through WRA, a nonprofit association that prepares joint H-2A applications for its members across the western United States. Plaintiff alleged that WRA and its members collectively suppressed wages at government-mandated minimums and prevented herders from moving between ranches.
Plaintiff’s third amended complaint pleaded two specifically targeted Sherman Act Section 1 claims: (1) an illegal agreement to fix sheepherder wages at or near the Adverse Effect Wage Rate (“AEWR”) applicable under the H-2A program and (2) a horizontal market-allocation scheme consisting of “no-transfer” and “no-solicitation” rules that bars herders from switching employers.
In response, defendants asserted several immunity defenses and argued that plaintiff’s claims must be reviewed under the rule of reason rather than as per se violations, if the H-2A regulatory context does not preclude liability altogether. Defendants’ immunity defenses included: (1) the Copperweld doctrine; (2) the express provisions of Section 6 of the Clayton Act; and (3) implied immunity created by the H-2A regulatory protocol.
The Court rejected each immunity argument:
- Defendants invoked the Copperweld doctrine, asserting that WRA and its member ranches function as one economic enterprise incapable of conspiring under Sherman Act Section 1. The Court disagreed, reasoning that WRA is an association of independent, separately owned and managed ranches that compete in the same labor market, each with its own economic interests and corporate consciousness.
- Relying on Section 6 of the Clayton Act, defendants next claimed that as an agricultural cooperative, WRA and its members were categorically exempt from antitrust scrutiny, arguing that Section 6 of the Clayton Act was intended to shield such organizations from liability for collective action. The Court rejected this, holding that Section 6 of the Clayton Act protects legitimate cooperation among producers in the processing and marketing of agricultural products, not agreements to restrain competition in the labor market. The Court found that WRA’s alleged conduct—fixing wages and restricting worker mobility—was not a legitimate object of an agricultural cooperative under the statute, as it did not relate to the sale or marketing of products, but rather to the suppression of labor competition.
- Defendants argued that the H-2A regulations created implied antitrust immunity because they believed that following Department of Labor rules for setting minimum wages and managing H-2A workers necessarily conflicted with the requirements of the Sherman Act, making it impossible to comply with both. The Court rejected this argument, stating that “implied antitrust immunity is not favored, and can be justified only by a convincing showing of clear repugnancy between the antitrust laws and the regulatory system.” In this case, the Court held, there is no “clear repugnancy” between the two regimes because the Sherman Act need not be repealed for the regulations to work. The H-2A regulations establish minimum wage floors and basic transfer procedures, but do not require or permit collusion to suppress wages or restrict worker mobility.
In response to defendants’ standard of review argument, the Court held that under the right factual circumstances, wage-fixing and no-poach agreements are condemned as per se violations. While antitrust courts do “consider the particular circumstances of an industry to occasionally allow interposing of a substantive justification to what would otherwise constitute a per se claim, the argument that the per se rule must be re-justified for every industry that has not been subject to significant antitrust litigation” ignores precedent. In this case, “agreements between competitors not to hire or solicit one another’s workers, or agreements on the maximum wage to be paid to those workers, have been examined under a per se analysis across industries.” Even if the H-2A context suggested a more sensitive analysis, the Court stated that the complaint alleges sufficient market-wide anticompetitive effects to survive under the rule of reason as well.
The Court denied defendants’ motion to dismiss, holding that plaintiff made specific allegations of wage-fixing and no-poach agreements that could not be dismissed on immunity grounds at this stage of the case.
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