October 9, 2008
Committee Chairman George Miller
Demands Withdrawal of H-2A Plans
On
October 9, 2008, Rep. George Miller of California, the Chair of
the House Education and Labor Committee, again asked the Bush
Administration to withdraw its harmful proposal to change the
H-2A temporary foreign agricultural worker program. His letter
is attached.
The
Department of Labor Office of Inspector General issued a
confidential report about the permanent labor certification
program, concluding that the DOL is not conducting the audits
that were to be the mechanism to ensure that abuses do not arise
from “labor attestation” system it adopted. In the H-2A
program, which requires a “labor certification” – certifying
that the employer is hiring US workers and offering decent wages
and working conditions – the Bush Administration has proposed to
adopt the “labor attestation” approach, a minimalist approach to
governmental control over the employment visa program. Under a
labor attestation program, the employer simply promises to
comply with the law; DOL does not monitor the employer’s
application to ensure that it is recruiting in the US and
offering the proper job terms. DOL claims that it will conduct
after-the-fact audits, but the H-2A proposal would substantially
weaken H-2A enforcement.
Rep.
George Miller sent a letter to Secretary Chao stating that the
confidential Inspector General report had revealed that the
agency had not been adequately enforcing the law under the labor
attestation program of the permanent labor certification
program.
Rep.
Miller asked Secretary Chao to withdraw the proposal to change
the H-2A and the H-2B programs’ regulations since they would
adopt a similar mechanism that the OIG concluded is not working
in the permanent labor certification process.
Download
Rep. Miller's letter here
April 14, 2008
Immigration Coalition Condemns Bush's "Deeply Flawed" Guestworker Plan
Proposal would undermine US workforce and exploit temporary foreign
labor
(Washington D.C.) Today over a hundred organizations from around
the country have issued formal objections to the Bush Administration’s
plan to overhaul the H-2A agricultural guestworker program. The
groups claim that these flawed changes would encourage agricultural
employers to hire a flood of foreign workers that would be brought
into the country without basic protections and assurances. The
Department of Labor (DOL) and the Department of Homeland Security
(DHS), who are issuing the proposed regulations changes, were open to
input on the plan during a short public comment period which ended
today.
The
H-2A program allows agricultural employers to hire foreign workers for
seasonal jobs using temporary work visas if they can show that there
is a shortage of U.S. workers. The program also ensures that the
wages and working conditions offered are not so low as to undermine
the labor standards of U.S. farmworkers. The groups claim that the
DOL has long neglected to enforce worker protections in the existing
plan, which has been plagued by abuses, and is now trying to rush
through an immensely flawed overhaul that would reduce government
oversight and worker protections even further.
According to a sign-on letter some of the groups submitted, the
intent of the proposed
changes is to increase employer’s access to
easily exploitable laborers from poor countries who could not demand
the wages and working conditions legal U.S. workers could. “The end
result of DOL’s proposed changes—developed with the requested input of
agricultural employers who have made clear their preference for a
captive workforce of young, male guestworkers—would be a diminishing
workforce of U.S farmworkers replaced by a vulnerable workforce of
exploitable imported temporary workers”. Although the DOL asked for
agricultural employer input for the program, it failed to ask the same
of farmworker advocacy and labor organizations.
The
solution to our nation’s need for farmworkers, the letter says, is to
reduce discrimination against agricultural workers in U.S. employment
law which results in farmworkers being denied the basic worker
protections afforded to workers in other professions.
“The
Administration has an opportunity to offer meaningful solutions to the
perpetual “plight” of farmworkers that has been the subject of exposés
and government commission recommendations for decades” the letter
states. “Rather than rise to this opportunity, DOL proposes to return
to a distant past of failed government policies and complicity in
rampant abuses by agricultural employers. By proposing regulations
relieving employers of liability, discouraging U.S. workers from
seeking H-2A jobs, lowering H-2A wages, eliminating or reducing many
of the program’s labor protections, and narrowing the class of U.S.
workers protected by the H-2A regulations, DOL would permit employers
to displace U.S. workers, exploit the vulnerability of hundreds of
thousands of guestworkers and worsen job terms for all farmworkers.
This nation should not go down that path once again”.
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March 10, 2008
Senators
Kennedy and Obama
Send Letters
to DOL requesting extended Public Comment Period on Proposed Changes to H-2A
Program
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March 06, 2008
Key
Senior Congressional Members Send Letters
to DOL Urging Withdrawal of Bush Proposal
Representatives Miller, Conyers, Berman, Woolsey and Lofgren
urge withdrawal of Bush Plan
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February 21, 2008
Clinton Issues Statement Criticizing Bush Administration Guestworker Plan
Thursday, February 21, 2008
Contact: Clinton Press Office 202-224-2243 or
press@clinton.senate.gov
STATEMENT OF SENATOR HILLARY RODHAM CLINTON ON THE DEPARTMENT OF
LABOR'S PROPOSED H-2A REGULATIONS
Washington, DC – “I am deeply concerned that the Bush
Administration's proposed H-2A regulations would worsen an already
flawed program. The changes would weaken protections for U.S. and
foreign workers, reduce government oversight, and slash wage rates,
while failing to address the many problems that have prevented
growers from using the program for more than a small fraction of
their labor needs. Our nation needs sensible, comprehensive H-2A
legislation that protects the rights and wages of workers and
provides a stable and sufficient workforce for growers. I call on
the Administration to join me in striving to achieve that kind of
real and meaningful reform.”
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February 20, 2008
Immigration
Coalition Seeks Withdrawal of Bush Plan to Overhaul H-2A Guestworker
Program
A major national immigration
coalition urges Secretary of Labor Chao to withdraw proposal to
change H-2A temporary foreign agricultural worker program due to
its anti-worker bias, and supports passage of the AgJOBS
legislation. The coalition is FIRM,
Fair
Immigration Reform Movement.
Read the
letter from FIRM here.
Farmworker
Advocates Request Extension on Public Comment Period
A coalition of organizations that
plan to submit comments on the Bush Administration’s proposal to
eliminate major labor protections in the H-2A agricultural
guestworker program has submitted a letter to Secretary Chao
asking her to extend the time frame for public comments from 45
days to 90 days. The letter is attached. The DOL’s complex
proposal contains numerous changes, some blatant and some not
obvious, that require extensive review and analysis that is not
reasonably possible in a 45-day period.
The groups that signed on to the letter
appear below. Thanks very much to those working on the comments and on
these efforts.
Farmworker Justice
AFL-CIO
California Rural Legal Assistance Foundation.
California Rural Legal Assistance, Inc.
Centro Campesino, Inc. (MN)
Change to Win
Farm Labor Organizing Committee, AFL-CIO
Farmworker Legal Services (Bangor, Michigan)
Florida Legal Services, Inc.
Friends of Farmworkers
International Brotherhood of Teamsters
League of United Latin American Citizens
MAFO, A Partnership of Farmworker Organizations
Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF)
National Council of La Raza
National Employment Law Project
National Farm Worker Ministry
Northwest Workers Justice Project
Organización en California de Líderes Campesinas, Inc.
Pineros y Campesinos Unidos del Noroeste (PCUN, Oregon)
Service Employees International Union
Student Action with Farmworkers
Texas RioGrande Legal Aid
UMOS (Wisconsin)
United Farm Workers
United Farm Workers Foundation
United Food and Commercial Workers International Union
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February 13, 2008
DOL announces sweeping
changes to H-2A Program
(WASHINGTON DC)—
The Bush administration has published their plans to substantially cut
the wages of agricultural workers in the U.S. and weaken the modest
labor protections of the H-2A guestworker program. These
administrative policies, announced today by the Department of Labor
(DOL) as a proposed change to regulations, would drastically lower
protections and minimum housing standards for the farmworkers who
harvest our nation’s crops. The changes also would allow employers
to hire foreign workers without having to first recruit U.S. workers
effectively and without meaningful government oversight. The
proposal should be withdrawn.
“Farmworkers face the most devastating
policy changes since the end of the abusive Bracero program in the
early 1960s” said Bruce Goldstein, Executive Director of Farmworker
Justice. “The White House and Secretary of Labor Elaine Chao are
heartlessly slashing wage rates and removing labor protections for
United States agricultural workers.
The administration is
encouraging agricultural employers to hire cheap foreign labor thus
lowering the wages for all U.S. workers,” he continued. “Employers
should offer wage rates based on America’s labor standards, not
those of developing nations.”
The Department of Labor will allow 45 days for the public to comment
on the proposal before finalizing it. DOL plans to reduce
government oversight of the application process by which employers
petition for foreign workers, by changing from a “labor
certification” process to a so-called “labor attestation” process,
which means that employers need only promise to comply with the
law.
The DOL proposal will also change the
wage formula for the H-2A program by using different statistics to
set the wage rate. Previously these rates were calculated based on
surveys performed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. For
example, the 2008 rates (based on 2007 wages) include: California,
$9.72 per hour; Georgia, $8.53; New York, $9.70; North Carolina,
$8.85 (down from $9.02 last year); Ohio, $9.90. Now the DOL wishes
to use flawed surveys by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) that
result in substantially lower wage rates. The
complex proposal would involve large numbers of individual wage
rates in numerous geographic areas and would allow employer
manipulation of the wage system.
In addition, many H-2A employers would no
longer need to provide workers with housing; they will be permitted
to provide a housing “voucher.” Frequently, there is no housing
available for farmworkers so a voucher is essentially worthless.
Farmworker Justice supports a solution to our farm labor needs that
was negotiated by the United Farm Workers and major agribusiness
employers called AgJOBS --the Agricultural Job Opportunities,
Benefits and Security Act.
“We already have hundreds of thousands of
farmworkers in this country who need better wages and working
conditions,” said Goldstein. “AgJOBS has broad bi-partisan support
in Congress. The Bush Administration should work with Congress to
pass AgJOBS, not lower wage rates and labor standards to enable
agricultural employers to bring in vulnerable guestworkers to
harvest America’s fruits and vegetables,” he concluded.
FJ Summary of Proposed Regulations: Illegal, Unfair and Counterproductive: The
Bush Administration Proposal on the H-2A Guestworker Program
One Page Statement on Proposed Regulations
by Farmworker Justice
See also the
United
Farm Workers' statement/Action-Alert page and the
AFL-CIO's statement on their website.
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Bush Administration Makes One-Sided Changes to the H-2A Agricultural Guestworker Program
IN November 2007 Memo
Context:
On August 10,
President Bush announced that the Administration would consider
changes to the H-2A agricultural guest worker program to streamline
the program while retaining labor protections.
In early October
2007, the Los Angeles Times reported on letters sent by the
National Council of Agricultural Employers (NCAE) to the Bush
Administration demanding extensive changes to the H-2A program. On
October 14th, the New York Times published an
editorial criticizing the Bush Administration’s plan to make one-sided
changes to the H-2A program and urging passage of AgJOBS.
On November 6, 2007,
the Department of Labor issued a memo that drastically limited H-2A
employer obligations to recruit US workers for the agricultural
employment. The memo also imposes the obligation on state workforce
agencies to verify employment eligibility of any US workers referred
to employers in response to an H-2A job order with a “strong
recommendation” to use the highly flawed E-Verify program. Farmworker
Justice and the UFW alerted Congress and issued press statements
condemning the DOL’s actions against farmworkers (click here to see
FJ’s press statement and here to see
UFW’s
press statement). On November 14, 2007, the DOL rescinded
the Nov. 6 memo but issued an equally illegal replacement.
Please see our bulletin
for more information. Through these illegal policies, the Bush
administration is enabling agricultural employers to hire cheap
foreign labor and helping to lower the wages for all U.S. workers.
The
Administration’s resources would be better spent cooperating on the
passage of AgJOBS and on enforcing the labor protection in the H-2A
program. These changes to the H-2A
program would not address the reality that the majority of
farmworkers already in the United States are undocumented.
The bipartisan AgJOBS legislation offers a
balanced approach that both employers and farmworkers can live
with and that will serve America well.
Q.
How did Congress Respond to the Administration’s Illegal Actions against Farmworkers?
A. Congressional members
wrote letters and press releases to
President Bush and Secretary Chao, click on the links below to read
them:
Q. What did Advocates Do in Response to the Administration's
Announcement of Plans to Change the H-2A Program?
A.
Farmworker Justice met with high-level officials from the DOL to
discuss changes to the H-2A program and submitted a
letter with recommended changes to the H-2A program.
FJ also is
working closely with the United Farm Workers union and other
farmworker, labor and immigration advocates around the country stop
these one-sided changes to the H-2A program. A
coalition of labor groups and a
coalition of Latino groups have sent letters to the
Administration opposing one-sided changes to the H-2A program.
In January of 2008, more than a dozen farmworker advocacy organizations, including
Farmworker Justice, released a letter to the Department of Labor (DOL) criticizing the agency for its recent and
illegal policy changes to the H-2A agricultural guestworker program as
outlined in a November 14th memo.
The groups are demanding that Secretary of Labor Elaine Chao immediately
retract the policy memo.
Press Release
Letter to DOL
and attachments:
November 14th DOL memo
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