Either the reporter, Julia Preston, is the most gullible person on the planet or she's carrying out her newspaper's anti-worker agenda. Maybe it's both.
The guest worker program, aka the H-2B visa program, is just one of the ways U.S. employers drive down wages. Others include slavery, prison labor, union busting, offshoring and wage theft, but we'll get to those another time. The U.S. Labor Department is putting new rules into effect on Sept. 30 that would require employers to pay guest workers by the hour instead of by piecework. They'll make more money that way. On Wednesday, Louisiana food associations sued to stop the rule.
H-2B has been called modern slavery. The National Employment Law Project (NELP) explains why. There is a long history of abuses in the program,
...ranging from labor violations to discrimination, wage and hour violations, visa fraud, debt peonage, involuntary servitude and labor trafficking that have long plagued this under-regulated program...
Temporary “guestworker” programs have long worked to the detriment both of the U.S. workers who are bypassed in favor of foreign workers, and for the foreign workers who fall prey to unscrupulous employers and their labor contractors. Dozens of criminal and civil prosecutions have been launched against employers and recruiters for filing fraudulent applications for non-existent jobs, for race and gender discrimination, for human trafficking and wage and hour violations.NELP explains how employers like the Louisiana alligator meat suppliers can claim they can't find Americans to do the work (the unemployment rate in Louisiana, which the Times doesn't mention, is 7.6 percent):
NELP advocates have been involved in cases where U.S. workers were bypassed in favor of foreign workers, sometimes through bogus advertisements in media designed to avoid U.S. workers, through unreasonable job qualifications, or through simple lack of follow up with qualified U.S. workers. One media investigation reported that an East Coast visa fraud conspiracy simply scheduled interviews with U.S. applicants for inconvenient times, such as 6 p.m. on Christmas Eve. The few Americans who actually appeared reported later that the interviewers were "intimidating" and made the jobs sound "as bad as possible." Yesterday, a Georgia news outlet reported cases involving employers who allegedly advertised H-2B jobs far from the actual location of the jobs, and refused to hire qualified workers referred to them by the state workforce agency.Some employers simply fire American workers and hire guest workers, as this Florida state senator allegedly did. The Miami Herald reported on Friday,
In the waning days of the 2011 legislative session, Sen. JD Alexander, one of the state’s most powerful lawmakers, delivered an impassioned floor speech against a measure that would have required employers to check the immigration status of new hires.At least some newspapers are on the ball.
Alexander, a Republican from Lake Wales, offered a firsthand account of housing guest workers from Mexico to help pick his crops.
“You can’t get anybody to come do this stuff, folks. And it’s the same thing, whether it’s construction, or whether it’s hotels. Americans don’t want to do it,” Alexander said moments before the Senate defeated the legislation, a top priority of Gov. Rick Scott.
Now, Alexander, who owns a farm in Polk County, is facing a lawsuit from two farmworkers who say he violated federal law by firing American citizens and green card holders and replacing them with guest workers.
