fieldreport:
However, the DOL's new rule
throws out the four OES tiers
and instead requires employers to pay no less than the
mean (average) of all four wage
ranges combined. Under this
jobs are hard to fill because
they're seasonal and because
too few Americans are willing
to perform hard manual labor
outdoors in the summer heat."
Under the new rule, these
the prices they charge their
customers, Egües points out.
"Instead, what we are seeing
is reputable employers choosing to shrink their operations,
keeping only higher-margin
H-2B employers simply are not able to pay higher wages
because they can't pass these costs on to customers.
rule, H-2B worker pay would
increase; in some cases, this
could be 36.58 percent or
higher compared to the previously established minimum.
"The DOL assumes you can't
find people for the jobs because
you don't pay enough," says
Ralph Egües, National Hispanic
Landscape Alliance (NHLA)
executive director. "In fact, the
inexperienced workers would
come in from overseas and be
paid more than half of those
currently working in that job,
who have more experience and
are more productive.
While the DOL is looking
for ways to increase workers'
incomes, this wage-control
rule won't achieve that goal if
employers can't also increase
work," he says. "So instead of
facilitating a program that helps
companies legally source workers to perform jobs Americans
don't want, thus enabling them
to grow and add the jobs they
do want, the new rule does the
opposite. It makes it unaffordable and more difficult to legally
import seasonal labor."
While H-2B affects a range of
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