Guest, local workers suffer at employers' will

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.newsday.com/news/opinion/ny-opfritop5679067may09,0,2297303.story

BY ROSS EISENBREY | Ross Eisenbrey is vice president of the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, D.C., which researches the impact of economic trends and policies on working people in the United States and around the
May 9, 2008

Unemployment is rising, hundreds of thousands of families are facing foreclosures on their homes, and wages are flat-lining (especially for workers without college degrees). Yet a noisy group of Long Island businesses claims the nation needs ... more workers willing to accept low wages and less likely to organize or otherwise assert their rights.

The businesses, part of a national coalition with well-connected lobbyists, are badgering Congress to allow more indentured workers into the United States. Not surprisingly, given that low-wage workers have no lobbyists of their own, many members of the U.S. House and Senate - including Rep. Tim Bishop (D-Southampton) - are listening attentively and getting ready to give these low-wage employers just what they want.

These special-interest lobbyists have been all over Capitol Hill demanding that Congress allow tens of thousands of additional "guest workers" into the country as dishwashers, hotel maids, crab pickers, landscape laborers and workers in other low-wage jobs. That would be bad news for the region's and the nation's low-wage workers, whether immigrant or native-born.

Current law permits a maximum of 66,000 foreign nationals to enter this country each year under a special visa program known as H-2B, if employers fail to find qualified U.S. workers. But employers are required to advertise for workers for only three days. If you're skeptical that dishwashers and landscape workers are so hard to find in a sinking economy, you're right. But because the law allows the businesses to advertise so briefly - and four months before the jobs become vacant - more employers each year somehow manage not to find anyone to do the work. That's because the whole process is designed to obscure this simple fact: There isn't a shortage of workers willing to do these jobs. There's a shortage of employers willing to pay a decent wage.

Ten years ago, only 20,000 H-2B visas were issued. In 2007, 130,000 were issued, even though more than 7 million Americans were unemployed and millions more had part-time jobs but wanted full-time work. Why are so many more businesses turning to foreign workers? Because the U.S. government lets them pay poverty-level wages.

Almost all H-2B employers pay less than a living wage, including most of the New York landscape businesses that use these visas. Some of the worst abusers are in the toniest areas. Out of 49 landscape businesses in the Hamptons certified to import "guest workers" last year, all but two paid less than $8.40 an hour. Yet the average wage for landscape laborers statewide was $12.56 in 2006.

FULL story at link.