Published Wednesday | March 5, 2008
Nebraska: Foreign workers taken off job site
BY STEVE JORDON
WORLD-HERALD STAFF WRITER

A subcontractor at a $630 million power plant under construction near Nebraska City has removed 61 Filipino welders from the job after Omaha union officials questioned their U.S. work status.

The subcontractor, Integrated Service Co., or InServ, of Houston, Texas, was asked to remove the workers by Zachary Construction Corp. of San Antonio, which is lead contractor for Nebraska City Power Partners, the plant developer.

Omaha Public Power District hired the partnership, which bid $30 million below the nearest bidder, for the project and will use about half of its electrical capacity.

Rick Hazuka, business representative for Steamfitters Local 464, said the union heard about the Filipino workers, checked into their visa status and raised the issue with OPPD. He said the union could have supplied U.S. welders for the power plant job but wasn't contacted by InServ.

OPPD spokesman Mike Jones said OPPD referred questions about the InServ workers to Zachary. "We expect all of our contractors . . . to do whatever's legal," Jones said.

Zachary spokeswoman Vicky Waddy said company officials looked into the complaint. The workers held jobs through the federal H2B visa program, which allows foreign workers to hold temporary jobs when U.S. workers aren't available.

Waddy said Zachary officials were concerned about the process InServ had used to ensure that the workers had proper visas. "In an abundance of caution we asked the employer to remove the employees from the site," she said, and InServ complied about 10 days ago.

Randi Donaldson, managing counsel for InServ, said the removed workers are at another welding job site in the United States that fits their visa status. Other InServ employees from the Philippines remain at the Nebraska City site and have visas that allow them to continue working there, she said.

"When the issue was raised, we looked into it and examined the paperwork to determine whether it could be argued that they were not on the site that they should be on," Donaldson said. "We made the decision to move them to another site.

"All the workers are here in the U.S. legally. They're documented. It's a question of placement on the project sites that we examined. We do continuously assess that issue — the visa issue is not real clear-cut — and make sure they're where they should be."

InServ supplements its U.S. welder work force with H2B visa-holders, she said. "I understand there's a shortage in the U.S. and other parts of the world" of welders with the specialized skills required in power plants.

Donaldson said she didn't know details of how the company decided to send the workers to the Nebraska City plant or whether the company tried to recruit U.S. welders first.

Some of the workers had been at the plant site since November, and some had arrived only last month, said Waddy, the Zachary spokeswoman. About two weeks worth of the welding remains at the plant, she said, and other employees will finish that work.

The workers' departure won't affect the construction schedule, she said. The plant is to go online by May 2009, OPPD spokesman Jones said.

Other participants in Nebraska City Power Partners are Black & Veatch, an international engineering company based in Overland Park, Kan., and Kiewit Corp. of Omaha.

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