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  1. #1
    Super Moderator GeorgiaPeach's Avatar
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    H2-B Crabpickers are so Important to the Maryland Seafood Industry

    Posted May 26, 2017 at 2:10 pm by Daniel Costa


    H-2B crabpickers are so important to the Maryland seafood industry that they get paid $3 less per hour than the state or local average wage


    Earlier this week, Washington D.C.’s WAMU aired a report highlighting—and celebrating—the hardworking Mexican women on Maryland’s Eastern Shore who pick crabmeat by hand. The Mexican women are in the United States temporarily, on a nonimmigrant guestworker visa called H-2B, which allows employers to hire migrant workers for non-agricultural seasonal jobs. The subheading of the story reads “Maryland crab processors say they couldn’t stay in business without Mexican guestworkers.” A tweet with an accompanying GIF from WAMU suggests that the reason employers hire H-2B workers to pick crab is because they’re so fast at what they do.


    Impressive to say the least. I don’t doubt how productive and valuable these workers are. Their bosses say they’re the heart of the crab industry. But upon closer inspection, it seems the seafood companies don’t really think this important work is worth a fair wage. The companies have lobbied tenaciously to make sure that the legal and regulatory framework of the H-2B visa program allows them to legally underpay their workers compared to what they would have to pay to attract workers in the free market—and the two employers featured in the WAMU story are perfect examples.


    Maryland crab is delicious, if you can afford it. At $30 to $50 per pound, it’s certainly not cheap. That’s why I was curious to know just how much these H-2B workers were valued by their employers. I looked up the H-2B disclosure data from the Department of Labor (DOL) for two of the seafood processors highlighted in the WAMU report, Russell Hall Seafood and G.W. Hall and Sons. According to those records, in fiscal 2017, DOL certified 50 H-2B jobs for Russell Hall Seafood and 30 for G.W. Hall and Sons.


    According to WAMU, the H-2B workers are paid $9.50 an hour. The DOL data list the wages employers promise to pay their H-2B workers, and indeed both promised to pay $9.51 an hour for the 2017 season. If this seems too low for this grueling work—work that requires especially talented and fast workers from Mexico—that’s because it is.


    All of the labor certifications for these 80 H-2B workers were classified under the occupational title of “Meat, Poultry, and Fish Cutters and Trimmers,” which is one of the top H-2B occupations every year. According to DOL survey data, the national average wage for this occupation is $12.27 per hour, and the Maryland statewide average wage is $13.32 per hour. The $9.51 the two employers pay their H-2B workers is $3.81 less per hour than the statewide average wage. $9.51 is also lower than the local average wage, according to another database using the same DOL data set: the average wage for Meat, Poultry, and Fish Cutters and Trimmers in the “Upper Eastern Shore of Maryland nonmetropolitan area” is $12.87 per hour (see “Mean Wage (H-2B)” on this page). That means the local average wage for crabpicking is $3.36 more per hour than what Russell Hall Seafood and G.W. Hall and Sons pay their H-2B guestworkers. $9.51 per hour isn’t even much more than the current Maryland state minimum wage of $8.75 per hour.


    How are employers allowed to pay such low wages to their H-2B workers? At the very end of the George W. Bush administration, DOL changed the H-2B wage rules to allow employers to pay much lower-than-average wage rates. The rule was later found by a federal court to have been illegally promulgated, and Obama’s DOL proposed to fix this early in the administration with a rule that required employers to pay their H-2B workers the local average wage for every H-2B job (according to DOL wage survey data). The new rule also restricted the use of employer-conducted private wage surveys, which is another way to establish the minimum wage rate that must be paid to an H-2B worker. As you can imagine, employers never use private wage surveys so that they can pay their workers more—they only use them to lower the minimum wage they have to pay.


    For nearly the rest of the Obama administration, H-2B employers managed to stop the wage rules from being enforced, both through litigation and by convincing Congress to defund DOL’s enforcement of the rules. Eventually, in April 2015, DOL and the Department of Homeland Security promulgated a new H-2B rule which required employers to pay the local average wage, and which included new, stricter rules for private wage surveys. But employers got around that again by lobbying successfully for a number of H-2B legislative riders in the fiscal 2016 omnibus appropriations bill, which included a provision expanding the use of private wage surveys. This provision was renewed in 2017, and the results so far have been unsurprising: wages are too low. According to my analysis, nationwide, the average wage employers promised to pay for the 5,447 H-2B jobs certified in Meat, Poultry, and Fish Cutters and Trimmers was $9.67 per hour. Since the national average hourly wage for all of the workers in that occupation is $12.27 per hour, that amounts to an average wage savings for employers of $2.60 per hour per worker, if they pay their workers via the H-2B wage rules rather than paying what they would have to pay to attract workers in the free market.


    Russell Hall Seafood and G.W. Hall and Sons have benefited from the private wage survey rules and appropriations riders directly. According to DOL disclosure data, both had private wage surveys approved that allowed them to pay $8.61 per hour in 2016 and $9.51 in 2017; much lower than the local average wage of $12.87. Russell Hall Seafood and G.W. Hall and Sons were also at the forefront of pushing wages down for H-2B workers—having complained publicly over the years that attempts to increase H-2B wage rates would put them out of business. In two news reports from 2011, they argued that paying their H-2B crabpickers more than the federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour would put them out of business. Well now they’re paying $9.50 and seem to be doing just fine.


    The quick, talented women who come from Mexico on H-2B visas to pick crabmeat in Maryland deserve to be paid $3 to $4 dollars more per hour—at least the local or state average wage for the jobs they do. And who knows? At $13 an hour, maybe some Maryland residents would want to give crabpicking a try, just as they did before the H-2B visa was created.


    http://www.epi.org/blog/h-2b-crabpic...-than-average/
    Last edited by GeorgiaPeach; 05-28-2017 at 04:37 PM.
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  2. #2
    Super Moderator GeorgiaPeach's Avatar
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    A Mexican Flag Flies High In A Trump County



    May, 2017


    Maryland crab processors say they couldn't stay in business without Mexican guestworkers.


    Armando Trull


    Nearly a three-hour drive southeast of Washington lies Hooper’s Island — actually three small islands connected by a causeway along the Eastern Shore. The tiny Dorchester County community bills itself as a collection of “authentic working watermen villages” that date back to the 1600s.

    But at this time of year, residents of the Latino immigrant communities of the Chesapeake Bay have a different way of describing it. “La Isla de las Mexicanas,” they call it — the Island of the Mexican Women.

    Only about 500 people live on Hooper’s Island. The census tract that contains the community is home to 943 souls.


    But every summer, that population swells with the arrival of several hundred Mexican women. They come to work for a handful of seafood processors, like Russell Hall Seafood, where Elpidia Martinez uses a small slim knife to extract the meat from freshly-caught crabs as Mexican music plays in the background.

    Over the past two decades, these Latinas have become the lifeline for an iconic Eastern shore industry. An estimated 600 migrate to Maryland every season under the H-2B visa programto do jobs their employers say Americans don’t want.

    What is an H-2B visa?

    The H-2B visa program started in 1987 with just 66 visas. Now, its 66,000 go mostly to companies engaged in landscaping and hotel cleaning. The competition for the limited number of visas available each year is heated.

    To qualify, businesses must show they can’t find American workers and undertake a complicated application process involving three federal agencies: the State Department, the Labor Department and the Department of Homeland Security. Employers complain that it’s a complicated bureaucratic minuet where any misstep can be costly.

    J. Leonard Newcomb, owner of Old Salty’s Seafood, a restaurant and seafood processing plant on Hooper’s Island, says that this year a snag with his paperwork at the Labor Department delayed his applications. As a result, he won’t be able to hire a dozen pickers. So his plant stands empty. Newcomb says he stands to lose tens of thousands of dollars.

    “At one time every lady on this island picked crabs,” says Harry Phillips, owner of Russell Hall Seafood. “Back in the day she would actually bring her daughter with her and her daughters would crack the claws.”

    But Phillips says that changed in the 1960s when it became illegal to bring children under 16 into factories.

    “This made a lot of their mamas stay home ’cause there weren’t no babysitters back then,” he says, adding: “Well by the time these girls were 16 they had other things on their mind not picking crabs — so that was the beginning of the end of the crab picker – the American crab picker.”

    Martinez started working at Russell Hall Seafood 21 years ago. She was recruited in Hidalgo, Mexico — more than 2,500 miles southwest of Hooper’s Island — through the H-2B visa program. She needed money.

    “My husband had died and I had four small daughters,” she recalls. She laughs now about how inexperienced and scared she was on her first day:

    “Oohhh I didn’t even know what a ‘crab’ was.”

    Now Martinez is a master picker, her hands a blur of activity as she tears off claws and shells, picks the juicy white meat and sorts it into small plastic tubs. A key part of the job: sorting the pricey lump crabmeat from the less expensive variety.

    Two decades of cuts from stubborn claws and slippery knives have paid for her daughters’ education, a small home and startup cash for her own business. Now a new generation is following her. There are pickers here as young as 18.



    Critics have argued that the H-2B visa program that provides the Mexican workers their temporary jobs takes work away from Americans.

    But in predominantly white, blue-collar Dorchester County where nearly 56 percent of the voters backed Donald Trump, many say their community and its livelihood depend on the Mexican guestworkers.

    At GW Hall and Sons, one of Hooper’s Island’s small seafood processors, Bryan Hall says couldn’t keep the business his grandfather started going without their help. “If we don’t get them, that’s two and a half American jobs that are gonna be lost,” says Hall, citing studies that he says found that H-2B pickers keep almost three Marylanders employed in the seafood industry.


    “I don’t think this country can afford to lose anymore jobs it’s bad enough as it is,” says Hall, shrouded by a a warm, white cloud moist with the smell of brine and crabs as he steams 600 pounds of the delicacies. Hall, who has been working in the seafood plant since he was a child — “I was three or four years old my father made me go count baskets on the trucks” — is luckier than some of his neighbors.

    Toddville, another village on the island, is a ghost town of abandoned homes, water damaged boats on rusty trailers and warehouses turned to rubble. Bill Seiling, executive director of the Chesapeake Bay Seafood Industries Association, says the reason is the businesses here opted to restrict their hiring to Americans and paid the price.

    Inside one of the abandoned warehouses, where a bulletin board hanging crookedly on the wall bears yellowed work sheets dating to 2001, he ruminates about the scene. “Very depressing,” Seiling says. “This was such a vibrant business enterprise. It was a focal point for all the industries in this area to buy trade and make deals.”

    (Woman beats machine)


    Seafood processors tried automation to make up the dearth of American pickers and avoid having to hire H-2B workers.

    Led by the father of the J.M. Clayton Company’s Jack Brooks, a number of Maryland processors invested in developing an automated crab picker. It looks like the love child of a cotton gin and a wheat thresher: The stainless steel contraption takes up almost 500 square feet with conveyor belts, large trays and strainers.

    “It shakes the crabs violently, tearing them apart, and the meat falls into containers to be sorted” says Brooks. But the machine couldn’t sort the choice lump crab meat from the lesser quality meat. Worse, “a lot of shell bits were getting through,” Brooks adds. “People don’t like biting into pieces of shell.” Now abandoned and partly covered in plastic, the picker could not match the Mexican women.
    Brooks employs more than a dozen H-2B visa workers and is an outspoken supporter of the program.




    At the pier, Justin Aaron takes a break from unloading his catch. He worries that his business may go the way of the abandoned warehouses because Americans seem more interested in eating crabs than picking them. “It’s tough,” he says. “Seems like Americans ain’t got no drive to work for us.”

    At the the bustling Russell Hall plant, owner Harry Phillips shows his feelings about labor demographics against the bright blue sky. Fluttering next to the Stars and Stripes from the building’s flagpole is the Mexican eagle on its red, white and green background.

    “We like Mexico,” says Phillips. “The ladies here — it makes them feel good. When they get here that flag goes up,” he adds. “Without these ladies we wouldn’t be in business.”

    Sometime after September 30, once there are no more crabs to be picked, the “ladies” will return to Hidalgo for the winter. La Isla de las Mexicanas will once again be just Hooper’s Island.


    Until next year.


    http://wamu.org/story/17/05/21/mexic...-trump-county/


    Last edited by GeorgiaPeach; 05-28-2017 at 04:58 PM.
    Matthew 19:26
    But Jesus beheld them, and said unto them, With men this is impossible; but with God all things are possible.
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  3. #3
    Senior Member posylady's Avatar
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    My question is who picked crabs before the illegals came?

  4. #4
    Senior Member Judy's Avatar
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    Americans picked the crab. Americans love crab, we've always picked our own crab .... until the illegals came.
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  5. #5
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    Toddville, another village on the island, is a ghost town of abandoned homes, water damaged boats on rusty trailers and warehouses turned to rubble. Bill Seiling, executive director of the Chesapeake Bay Seafood Industries Association, says the reason is the businesses here opted to restrict their hiring to Americans and paid the price.
    And you undercut them and caused them to fail. Why don't you import to your area homeless American people - give them the work.

  6. #6
    Senior Member artclam's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by posylady View Post
    My question is who picked crabs before the illegals came?

    What evidence is there that illegals are picking crab meat?

  7. #7
    Senior Member Judy's Avatar
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    Uh Oh, you're right, artclam. The article says they're H2B visa workers, so if that's true, they would be legal workers.
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