If you’re an American worker or taxpayer, the headline at the top of The Bulletin’s front page on Sunday made your blood boil – or should have.
“Stimulus jobs go to foreign workers,” it said. Underneath it, a subhead elaborated: “Oregon contractors hiring for forest work, say qualified locals unavailable.”The story went on to describe how nearly $13 million in federal stimulus money has gone to Oregon forestry companies that are using temporary, seasonal foreign workers.
Competitors of the companies that use imported workers complain they can’t compete with them for contracts because of the low wages they pay. One of them, Darst Atherly, said that on one job his company was underbid by 50% by a competitor who uses foreign workers.
Companies are allowed to bring in foreign workers under something called the H-2B program, which issues temporary visas to foreigners if employers can’t find enough qualified American workers to do the job. That’s what the forestry companies that are importing workers claim.
And claiming it is all they have to do. The government doesn’t check to see if there’s really a shortage of American workers; if a company says so, the feds take the company’s word for it.
Frankly, with unemployment in Oregon in double digits and tens of thousands of Oregonians desperate for any kind of work, it strains credulity to think companies couldn’t find plenty of Oregonians to fill their payrolls. So why not hire Oregonians instead of using imported workers?
Because bringing in workers on H-2B visas can make life a lot easier – and more profitable – for an employer.
H-2B workers are in the country, basically, at the pleasure of their employer. Under the terms of the federal stimulus bill they’re supposed to get paid the “prevailing wage,” but they’re not likely to make a stink if they don’t. They’re also not likely to complain about long hours, squalid living quarters or unsafe working conditions.
The Southern Poverty Law Center, in a report aptly titled “Close to Slavery,” wrote that workers who are here on H-2 visas “are systematically exploited and abused. Unlike U.S. citizens, guest workers do not enjoy the most fundamental protection of a competitive labor market – the ability to change jobs if they are mistreated. Instead, they are bound to the employers who ‘import’ them. If guest workers complain about abuses, they face deportation, blacklisting or other retaliation.”
The H-2 program is inhumane and abusive toward the “guest workers” under the best of circumstances – and it insults American workers and taxpayers to be using stimulus money to bring in foreign workers at a time when this nation is mired in the worst recession since World War II.
The SPLC calls for the H-2 program to be scrapped, or, failing that, to be “completely overhauled.” Given the clout of agribusiness in Congress, that’s not likely to happen anytime soon.
But nothing’s stopping us from giving the program THE BOOT right now, along with the companies that use it to deprive Americans of jobs that are rightfully and legally theirs.
This article appears in Jul 29 – Aug 4, 2010.
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And some people still think that our border with mexico should be a revolving door. It’s time to get a clue. The Rule of Law should prevail. Immigration laws are not racial. “Undocumented Workers” are ILLEGAL. Right is right regardless of sympathy for those who are oppressed by their own governments. Perhaps they should stay in their own countries and try to fix their broken systems before they come here feeling entitled to special treatment and protection FROM our laws.
Unfortunately, these workers aren’t illegal. They have legal status granted by the government at the request of the employer. This made my blood boil as well. How much does anyone want to bet that the immigrant labor is being paid a full competitive wage? Payroll kickbacks, miserable working and living conditions, and a labor force that is ignorant of their rights and easily abused.
This is as funny as the high tech industry that brings in Indian and Chinese computer programmers because there are none available for the jobs in this country.
Business and government working together as they have for the last seventy years to pull the rug out from under American labor and the working class and avoid paying a living wage.
The sad part of the whole thing is in a region, a state and town built on the timber industry no one, not The Source, the O or the Bullshiten pointed out that there remains a substantial population of not quite Old Loggers still just getting by after the industry died twenty years ago that would probably give up their remaining teeth to get back out in the woods.
Must have just disappeared or something. Like we never existed.
Yeah, we need a wall – from Eureka California to Eureka Montana.