Thread: {SOB} Fresno: Good workers hard to keep

Good workers hard to keep
Local businesses fear losing hard-to-replace employees as new Homeland Security rules take aim at illegal immigrants.
By Robert Rodriguez / The Fresno Bee
09/02/07 05:17:04


Clovis factory owner Ed Hawke doesn't have to wait for a warning letter from the federal government to tell him he may have employees who are not authorized to work in the United States.

He thinks he already knows.

Two of his seven workers have Social Security numbers that don't jibe with government records. And he senses it isn't a clerical error.

"I think we have run out of wiggle room on this one," said Hawke, owner of Hawkepaks, which makes equipment bags, vests and packs for public service agencies. "If it's determined that their paperwork is false, I don't see how they will ever be able to straighten it out."

Losing two employees would hurt Hawke's small company. Experienced assemblers and sewers are hard to find. But he has little choice.

New rules issued three weeks ago by the Department of Homeland Security are aimed at rooting out undocumented workers and punishing employers who knowingly hire them.

Hawke and thousands of other business owners are in regulatory cross hairs. Many are scrambling to find answers -- about how to avoid punishment and handle a potential worker shortfall should they be forced to fire a large number of employees.

Finding new workers won't be easy for Hawke. He's tried using employment agencies but that hasn't always worked out.

"They send me forklift drivers," Hawke said. "I need people who can sew, and many of the workers I get come through word of mouth. And they come trained from their countries' garment industries.

"We don't have that in this country anymore, we gave it away."

The DHS and the Social Security Administration is poised to send the first batch of 140,000 letters to companies that have more than 10 employees whose names don't match government records -- an indicator a worker may be undocumented.

About 35,000 of those are to be sent to individual California businesses.

For years, employees had been receiving the notices on an individual basis. This effort targets employers and will come with stepped up enforcement.

The DHS is threatening employers with newly increased fines -- $2,200 per employee for the first offense -- if they fail to take reasonable steps to resolve the mismatch or flat out ignore the law.

"What we have done is made it abundantly clear what is expected of an employer," said Veronica Nur Valdez, a DHS spokeswoman. "We are not going to tolerate people who blatantly disregard the law."

Ruling Friday on a lawsuit by the AFL-CIO against the U.S. government, U.S. District Judge Maxine Chesney granted a temporary restraining order prohibiting "no-match" letters from going out as planned starting Tuesday.

Chesney said the court needs "breathing room" before making any decision on the legality of new penalties aimed at cracking down on the hiring of illegal immigrants.

She set the next hearing on the matter for Oct. 1.

The impending crackdown has caused widespread concern among industries that rely on undocumented workers -- most of whom come from Mexico and other Latin American countries -- to do jobs that employers say many U.S. workers won't do.

Farmers, janitorial companies and garment makers struggle to hire a legal work force. Agriculture industry groups and farm labor advocates estimate that 70% of the nation's farmworkers are undocumented.

Industry groups, employment lawyers and business owners have been meeting privately and in large numbers to better understand the new rules.

"I have been on solid conference calls for the last two weeks with clients representing different industries," said Cynthia Lange, a Bay Area immigration attorney. "It seems like there isn't an industry that isn't affected."

Kim Parker, executive vice president of California Employers Association in Sacramento, recently has been receiving 10 calls a day about how to handle the increased enforcement from industries statewide.

"Undocumented workers in this state are all over, and it is a situation that the government is now trying to clean up," Parker said. "But at least this time they have given employers some steps to follow."

Under the new rules, an employer who receives a "no-match" letter from the Social Security Administration must resolve the issue within 90 days.

Clerical errors can be easily fixed and happen often. But an employee has only one option when using fraudulent documents or borrowing another worker's Social Security number: "They [the employer] will have the responsibility to let that person go or risk being fined," said Valdez, of the DHS.

Which puts employers in a quandary: How do they fill the jobs?

"We have been struggling to find those answers even before the new enforcement," said Jack King, manager of national affairs for the California Farm Bureau Federation. "We are already dealing with a labor shortage."

King said growers are working harder at keeping their full-time employees, looking at ways to increase efficiency, experimenting with mechanization or switching to less labor-intensive crops.

One farm labor analyst said some workers may continue working through the 90 days the government allows before cracking down, then move to another job using a new name and Social Security number.

"It is going to be the same worker, but just a different name and number," said Gregorio Billikopf Encina, a University of California labor management farm adviser.

Whether there will be a greater number of people switching identities or just dropping out of the work force altogether remains to be seen, experts say.

Russel Efird, president of the Fresno County Farm Bureau, said there is little farmers can do to prepare for a possible worker shortage.

"We are going to have to wait and see how this unfolds," said Efird, a nut and grape grower with about a dozen full-time workers.

Efird said the crackdown makes little sense to him: "These are jobs that people on unemployment don't want to do."

And raising salaries isn't always enough -- especially to lure people to do farm work.

"Generally speaking it doesn't happen," Encina said. "The fact is that non-Hispanic people are not really interested in some of those jobs."

Farmers see one solution and are pushing the AgJobs bill, which would offer legal residency and eventually U.S. citizenship to 1.5 million illegal immigrants now working in agriculture. It also would streamline an existing guest-worker program.

Finding good workers and keeping them is a constant struggle for Suzanne Bishop, owner of The Master's Helping Hands in Fresno, a cleaning service.

She has been in business for 20 years, and says her work force has changed from native born to foreign born.

More than half of her 12 workers were born outside the United States. She said she has done her due diligence to make sure they are legal.

"If it turns out that someone is not legal, I am going to be upset" with the new rules, Bishop said. "I have worked so hard to get the employees that I have. When I get them, I want to keep them."

The Associated Press contributed to this report. The reporter can be reached at brodriguez@fresnobee.com or (559) 441-6327.

http://www.fresnobee.com/business/story/127750.html

The goal is to get illegals out of the country and if needed bring them in for farms or other businesses that need them. I can't understand why these articles are so one sided. Why don't they print the truth behind all of this.
If we need Hispanics in our fields or elsewhere we need to know who they are, if they have criminal records, who they live with and when they are due to go back to Mexico.
The wage should be fair and taxes should be paid. The employer needs to be responsible for this. This is the law.
What we have here are a bunch of businesses who are capitalizing and make money on illegals workers. The middle class is not getting a cost benefit. The corporations are taking the extra money and pocketing it and passing the health, school, insurance costs on our cars and homes and passing this cost onto the middle class citizen.
Why can't we see some fairness in these articles?
Why can't the truth be told that the middle class american is being destroyed by the government and corporations?
Why can't the truth be told that our neighborhoods are turning into third world living conditions. Why can't the truth be told that diseases are coming back into america? Why can't the truth just be told?