Posted on 03/06/2019 1:32:58 AM PST by blueplum
PORTLAND, Maine (AP) — Maine's U.S. senators are working with a bipartisan group of colleagues to call for an increased number of work visas to help small businesses find seasonal workers.
Republican Susan Collins and independent Angus King are asking the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to bump the number of H-2B visas...They want the department to increase the 66,000 cap on the visas to more than 135,000.
(Excerpt) Read more at hosted.ap.org ...
Worker shortage? BS. No, what there is is a wage shortage.
I am not from Maine so my info comes by way of my BIL who was raised there. He recalls schools closed during blue berry season so their would be help to harvest them. Most people live in southern Me. He added most of them are relocated Massholes. He lived north of where 95 ended. Industry there is mostly hunting, logging, and other outdoor activities or as he put it, normal people.
He added they had pretty lax welfare laws and the southern state cities had become welfare havens until they put in a work requirement.
As far as that state goes, I don’t recall Trump getting much support from anyone up there so he should use the carrot and hammer approach. Give me my carrots or I will hammer you out of existence as you have given me nada.
Pay more, get less......that’s the ticket
Republicans are free market capitalists except when it come to employment and wages. Then they become hypocrites.
Says the union communist?
What an idiot. Only 7% of workers in the USA are in a union. This has nothing to do with unions. Stuff it global corporate s$$wipe.
SOMEONE EXPLAIN THE PURPOSE OF THE GOP?
HELL NO! A tight labor market is ideal. Companies will have to increase wages. THAT is the free market.
Abusing the work visa program to import a bunch of cheap labor so companies can crush the bargaining power of Americans in their own country is not the free market. That is rigging the game.
My son and DIL have spend a couple of weeks in Maine over the past year.
The local restaurants in the touristy harbor towns hire Eastern Europeans for seasonal work as, in the words of the restaurant manager, “cannot find any locals who are willing to work”.
A better way to address their “need for workers” would be for the state of Texas to charter a fleet of buses, park them near the border, load them up as they cross over, and transport the “workers” directly to Maine. Dump two or three hundred thousand in front of the state capital and allow the taxpayers of Maine to deal with them.
It will be interesting to see if the various Trump resorts get there usual allotment of H2B’s this year. This is a very popular program with the Trump organization. Apparently, Americans don’t have any interest in working at Maralago or the New Jersey golf club.
“It isn’t about getting cheaper labor is is about getting labor that is drug free and with clean background checks. Something lacking in the current work force. And if you had a clue about the current workforce you would know that!”
And they got that way by having no jobs and/or no future, having their wages depressed or jobs displaced by foreign workers. How, I wonder, did that ever happen?
That is what the manager was trying to say but was diplomatic about it according to my son.
I say any company that wants to import labor needs to be held accountable to the American Public to make sure that these imported workers are able to live off what the Company wants to pay.
It’s not my responsibility to pay for food, healthcare, education et al for their family just because Acme Trinket Company needs 1,000 cheap labor somalians to count and box trinkets.
If they Company can’t do that, they need to either raise their prices, stop selling trinkets or find AMERICAN labor pool to hire from.
Same for Agricorps and Tourism Industries.
They are here legally. Any violation of the program rules the employers has to send them back.
It costs the employers more to hire H2Bs than stateside employees.
YOU and others seem to not understand the current condition of the labor market for seasonal employers or any idea how the H2B program actually works.
>>>Republicans are free market capitalists except when it comes to employment and wages. Then they become hypocrites.
According to recruiting files sent to the U.S. Department of Labor by Mar-a-Lago, Trump National Golf Club in Jupiter, Fla., and Trump National Golf Club in Briarcliff Manor, N.Y., 144 jobs were open from 2016 to 2017.
Workers possessing H-2B visas would reportedly be given 143 of them, operating in such roles as servers, bartenders and housekeepers. The sole American worker was hired as a cook.
Maine has a lack of seasonal labor for reasons importing cheap, low skilled workers will NOT fix. ME’s senators want to treat the the symptoms, not the disease.
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