Spending bill would block immigrant wage hikes in 2012
Spending bill would block immigrant wage hikes in 2012
thetowntalk.com
Written by
Billy Gunn
8:23 AM, Dec. 22, 2011
Legislation is expected to be signed into law soon that would prevent the U.S. Department of Labor from instituting wage hikes for seasonal immigrant workers in 2012.
Various industries, including seafood processing and forestry in Louisiana and elsewhere, have been worried that the wage hikes would drive up costs so much that some companies would go out of business.
U.S. Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-New Orleans, and a U.S. senator from Maryland inserted language in the recently passed fiscal year 2012 mega-appropriations bill in Washington that prevents the Labor Department from proceeding with the wage hikes in 2012.
President Obama is expected to sign the legislation.
Foresters, seafood processors, carnival operators and other U.S. companies that hire out-of-country workers for part of the year were bracing for a financial hit that was to come Jan. 1, 2012, the Labor Department's start date of "prevailing wage" regulations.
"The Congress really did businesses a favor by doing what they've done in the appropriations bill," said Buck Vandersteen, director of the Louisiana Forestry Association, headquartered in Alexandria.
Labor Department staff in 2010 crafted prevailing wage levels based on U.S. worker pay in regions. In January, a federal judge in Pennsylvania ordered Labor officials to set and enforce new immigrant wage guidelines this year. The implementation has been delayed several times.
Though it was the Labor Department's spending bill, Landrieu essentially wrote a law within appropriations legislation.
"It says you may not do this for a year," Landrieu told The Town Talk. "It took a lot of time and energy to do this."
Landrieu and Sen. Barbara Mikulski, D-Maryland, wrote the preventive language. Both are members of the Senate Appropriations Committee composed of 16 Democrats and 14 Republicans.
Maryland, like Louisiana, has many seafood-processing companies that use immigrant labor in industries with thin profit margins. In November, some Louisiana seafood processors testified in U.S. District Court in Alexandria that wage hikes to H-2B workers likely would force them out of business.
In some cases, wages paid to seasonal workers in the U.S. on an H-2B visa would increase by 100 percent. And some companies, such as those that plant trees, would have had to absorb the financial hit in mid-work season.
Associations representing foresters, seafood processors and carnival operators in September sued the Labor Department in U.S. District Court in Alexandria challenging the wage hikes.
The lawsuit in Alexandria was one of three in the country dealing with the Labor Department's mandate, and federal Judge Dee Drell of Alexandria eventually transferred the lawsuit to a court in Pennsylvania. Another federal judge in Florida, overseeing a mirror-image lawsuit to the one in Alexandria, kept the case in her Florida court.
Labor officials in court documents say that higher pay rules for immigrants would lead to more Americans being employed. They also said judges and Labor Department rules shouldn't consider employer hardship.
Business owners say that Americans wouldn't perform some of the jobs at any pay, and that not considering employer hardship is absurd and detrimental to large and small businesses and to the people they employ.
http://www.thetowntalk.com/article/2...20333/1002/rss
