Denied labor applications rising
Tuesday, 07 April 2009 00:00 By Gemma Q. Casas - Variety News Staff
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MORE employers who want to hire foreign workers are being turned down by the Department of Labor.

“There has been a large increase in the number of applications denied. Appeals of these denials have been filed in 627 cases from June 2008 through March 2009…. The director’s disqualification has been upheld in many cases, and the employer has been denied permission to employ foreign workers,” said Deputy Labor Secretary Cinta M. Kaipat in her latest report to the Legislature.

She said the stringent scrutiny of foreign labor applications aims “to weed out employers who are insolvent, who lack the necessary resources to pay their foreign workers, who may not be providing a real job, or who are otherwise unqualified.”

The labor official said the measure benefits the cash-strapped CNMI government and foreign workers who may have been otherwise exploited.

“This has three beneficial effects: first, the number of unfit employers has been reduced very substantially, resulting in fewer labor complaints from foreign workers about not being paid; second, the number of employment scams set up solely for the purpose of allowing foreign workers to remain in the commonwealth while unemployed has been reduced, resulting in fewer law enforcement problems,” she said.

“And third, the number of U.S. citizens hired has increased because a business can hire a U.S. citizen without any scrutiny of its finances by the Labor Department,” she added.

The government continues to encourage private sector employers to hire U.S. citizens or local residents instead of foreign workers.

Kaipat, however, said this policy still allows displaced foreign workers to apply for jobs.

“Since Oct. 2008, we have processed transfer requests for 615 foreign workers who have been displaced in their jobs by U.S. citizen hires. That is only one informal measure of our success because not every foreign worker who is displaced elects to request permission to transfer; some elect to be repatriated,” she said.

Labor Department data showed more than 16,000 foreign workers left the islands for their home countries from 2006 to 2008.

Majority of these workers have opted to be repatriated after the conclusion of their labor cases.

“During the last three years — 2006, 2007, and 2008 — the Department has processed and completed the repatriation of over 16,000 foreign workers. This has been an enormous administrative task of completing labor cases, securing repatriation tickets, and making voluntary arrangements for departures,” Kaipat said in her report.

“The department has done this work quietly and efficiently, working cooperatively with foreign workers and their representatives to accommodate hardship concerns and to honor requests for the timing of repatriation,” she added.