In this lawsuit, we will represent individuals who have filed Forms ETA 9141, Application for a Prevailing Wage Determination (PWD), prior to October 1, 2022. We will be suing the Office of Foreign Labor Certifications (OFLC) and the Department of Labor (DOL) because the OFLC is failing to work on these applications in a timely manner. According to the most recently published data, OFLC is currently processing Forms ETA-9141 which were filed in January 2022. This twelve-month processing time is up from the office’s historic average of 2-4 months from FY 2016 through FY 2020.
The failure to adjudicate these applications in a timely manner adversely impacts employers’ ability to hire needed employees, threatens those in H-1B classification with losing their status, and adversely affects the ability of institutions of higher education to meaningfully take advantage of the special handling procedures implemented to ensure the most qualified professors are hired.
Federal agencies must do their job with due regard to the necessity and convenience of the interested parties. We will ask a federal judge to order OFLC to immediately adjudicate our plaintiffs’ PWD requests.
The primary goal for this case is to file quickly and push for discovery. We do not anticipate the need for a preliminary injunction. Our secondary goal is to push processing times of PWD requests back down to their historical levels.
If you would like to join the lawsuit, please do all the following:
Step 1: Review the FAQ to confirm that you qualify to participate and that you understand what the case is about and how the plaintiff fee works.
Step 2: Complete our engagement letter app. This will create an engagement letter (contract) for you to review and sign and will automatically send a copy to our team and to you.
Step 3: Pay your fee here. The legal fee to join the lawsuit is $5000 for every initial prevailing wage request and $500 for each additional prevailing wage request filed by the same company/employer. (Employer is defined by reference to a particular EIN. Every employer with a different EIN will be considered a separate plaintiff in the lawsuit.) The fee is a one-time charge, and we will not be billing for additional expenses and legal fees. The fee is due at the time of signing the engagement letter with IMMpact Litigation. If you have questions about payment, please contact litigation@immigrationissues.com.
Step 4: Use our declaration generator app to tell us about how the Office of Foreign Labor Certifications and the Department of Labor’s delayed processing has harmed you.
Once you have completed all the above steps, you have signed up!
You’ll receive an automatic email confirmation when we’ve received your engagement letter and declaration. This, and your payment confirmation email, means that you are in our database and will be included in our lawsuit. If any information or documents are missing, we will contact you before filing the case. Otherwise, we’ll be in touch with all plaintiffs when we have filed the lawsuit with the court.
In the meantime, please do not contact our team asking for further confirmation that we have received your materials; this slows us down when we’re doing our best to prepare our filing quickly.
If you have any legal or non-financial questions related to this case, please click here to contact us via our online form. Please select ‘PWD Case’ in the drop-down.