Labor & Employment Law

New H-2B Wage Rules an Improvement, But Delay Hurts Workers

By Mike Hall

The Obama administration today announced a new rule on how the wage rates employers must pay to H-2B temporary foreign workers will be calculated. But the new rule does not take effect until 2012.

The H-2B visa program allows employers to hire temporary workers from foreign countries for jobs they say they can find no qualified or willing American workers to do. Employers bring in tens of thousands of such workers each year. 

AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka says in a statement that the new rule is an improvement on the current process and it:

means that in the future, U.S. workers will be first in line for jobs that currently go to temporary foreign workers.  But the administration’s decision to delay implementation means the change won’t come soon enough for unemployed workers who need jobs now.

Trumka says the delay “gives too great a concession to the Chamber of Commerce and other business groups that profit from employing low-paid foreign guest workers.”

Under the current H-2B wage rule, an employer can advertise an open position at a wage that is 25 percent or more below the market rate paid to U.S. workers. When no qualified U.S. worker applies, the employer is allowed to bring in a temporary foreign worker to fill the position and pay that worker the below-average wage.

In October, Labor attorney Greg Schell told Dan Rather on HDNet?s Dan Rather Reports:

Business left to its own devices will try to employ labor at the lowest possible cost. The wage that is paid the H-2B worker becomes not the floor, it becomes the ceiling. The employer knows that he can get an unlimited supply of workers at that price without any benefits; he will never have to pay a penny more.

Trumka says the current rule places firms that hire locally and their employees at a disadvantage  because they have to compete with companies that take advantage of the artificially low labor costs allowed by the H-2B rule.

The vast majority of the jobs covered by this rule aren’t glamorous?they’re construction laborers, maids, dishwashers and groundskeepers.  But for jobless workers, including millions of young workers who can’t find any job, such positions are the first rung on a ladder leading to a lifetime of steady employment.  We need to extend a lifeline to this generation of jobless young Americans and to the unemployed immediately. Delay is the wrong way to respond to our nation’s job crisis.

The AFL-CIO backs strong protections for immigrant workers? freedoms and rights and opposes current guest worker programs. In policy statements, the AFL-CIO Executive Council has said future workers should come to this country with full rights, not as temporary workers.

Click here for the full statement and here for more from Economic Policy Institute (EPI) Vice President Ross Eisenbrey.

Full post as published by AFL-CIO NOW BLOG on January 18, 2011 (boomark / email).