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US proposes tightening visa rules to give citizen applicants better chance against foreign guest...

Palm Beach Post – August 6, 2011

The U.S. Labor Department is raising the wages employers must pay foreign guest workers and is proposing other major changes that could diminish the number of foreign citizens imported to work in the hospitality industry in Palm Beach County.

In August 2010, a federal court in Pennsylvania found that employers who are importing guest workers nationwide — using H-2B visas for low skilled labor — are being allowed to pay lower than average wages to those foreign employees for the positions they fill.

Workers organizations that sued over the issue said, in effect, the employers were driving wages down and making the jobs unattractive to U.S. workers.

The court ordered that wages be paid that better approximated the average wage for each job in specific parts of the country and on Sept. 30 those changes will take effect. Not only will H-2B workers get higher wages but employers who employ H-2Bs have traditionally been obligated to pay local workers in the same positions at least that same wage.

Palm Beach County was approved last year for more H-2B workers than any other county in Florida. Almost all of them —1,552 workers — were approved for luxury resorts and country clubs.

According to Labor Department wage schedules, minimum wages for most H-2B positions in the Palm Beach County hospitality field will increase anywhere from about 50 cents per hour to as much as $3 per hour. The jobs include waiters, cooks, housekeepers, bartenders and kitchen helpers. They are classified as seasonal, but most last seven to 10 months.

Community-based organizations such as the Urban League, NAACP and the Hispanic Human Resources Council of Palm Beach County have all decried the practice of importing guest workers and say it costing local residents jobs. Unemployment overall in the county is 10-11 percent, but it is double that in minority communities.

Congressmen Ted Deutch, D-Boca Raton, Alcee Hastings, D-Miramar and Tom Rooney, R-Tequesta, have all expressed concern that the program may be costing U.S. workers jobs.

Among the employers certified to import workers in the past year were: The Breakers, Mar-a-Lago, and the Palm Beach Country Club all of Palm Beach; The Ritz-Carlton in Jupiter; The Marriott Ocean Pointe in Palm Beach Shores; and the Polo Club, Boca West, and Boca Rio country clubs, all in the Boca Raton area.

Representatives of those employers were asked to comment about how the new wage rules would affect them, but they did not reply.

Local critics of the H-2B program say the resorts and country clubs are using the program to depress wages and save money. One worker advocate, Greg Schell of Florida Legal Services, speculated that forcing employers to pay higher wages to imported workers might lead those employers to hire more local workers instead.

“That’s certainly the idea, ” Schell said. “You would think it might work that way, but we’ll see.”

Other proposed changes to the H-2B rules could make it even more difficult for employers to continue to import workers with those guest worker visas. At the moment, if an employer plans to import workers, that employer must advertise the jobs for two days in a newspaper and 10 days on the state’s EmployFlorida.com website.

But the employer can do that three to four months before the job is to begin and can then can stop local recruitment efforts and apply for the foreign workers. Advocates for local workers say that sharply curtails the number of local workers who apply because they do not want to wait months before beginning work.

Under the new proposed rules, local workers will be able to apply for the jobs until three days before the job is to begin, which should lead many more local workers to apply.

“That’s huge,” said Schell. “That’s one of the biggest changes. If there is any good faith you would think that there would be a lot more local people hired.”

The new H-2B rules would also require that employers in areas suffering high unemployment, like Palm Beach County, do more local recruiting. Among the requirements proposed are that employers do radio advertising and they contact community based organizations and churches.

The proposed rules would also give local Workforce Alliance officials more responsibilities in overseeing the recruitment process. Under procedures adopted by the administration of George W. Bush, employers had simply to claim a need for guest workers and they could then begin the visa process. Any scrutiny of an application was done after the fact, often after foreign workers were already in the country, and that scrutiny was rare.

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