Sep 27, 2011 5:44 PM

East End businesses that rely on seasonal immigrants to fill out their summer staffing needs fear that a proposed U.S. Department of Labor rule will require them to pay workers as much as double current wages, threatening many business’s financial viability or the quality of their services.

Earlier this year the department issued a rule that would boost by as much as 100 percent the wages that many seasonal workers in a variety of positions must be paid if they are brought to the U.S. by employers under the popular H-2B Seasonal Visa program. The increases varied depending on the type of work done, based on the results of a wage survey conducted by the labor department, but most required increases of at least 35 to 40 percent.

“It’s a bit crazy—pool companies are paying $9 and change now and the Department of Labor comes in and tells them they’re going to have to pay $18 an hour now and that’s not even counting overtime,” said Lissette Hildesheim, a Hampton Bays attorney who has represented a number of East End employers who have relied on H-2B workers for years. “This is going to really affect landscaping companies, pool companies, hotels—they rely on H-2B workers. Some of them will have to close if this becomes a rule.”

The H-2B Seasonal Visa allows employers to legally bring foreign workers to the U.S. to fill pre-arranged positions they cannot find Americans willing or able to do. The workers can stay in the U.S. for up to 10 months in most cases, after which they must return to their native country for at least two months before they can apply to return. Many East End hotels, pool service and landscaping companies have relied heavily on the H-2B workers for more than a decade to fill labor crews and as chambermaids. Business owners say that it is impossible to find Americans who are willing to do the hard manual labor of moving and planting trees or the menial tasks of maids and cleaning staff and that without the H-2B program many of them would be driven to turn to undocumented immigrants.

“The money is a big issue, but it’s not just how much more it would cost. There are not people here who can do the jobs,” said Fernando Bustamante, a Montauk landscaper who owns Warren’s Nursery in Water Mill. “If we have to pay $15, we will get people apply for jobs who cannot dig holes for trees. They can’t do this kind of work, there’s no way and then we’ll be stuck.”

The H-2B program requires that any jobs to be filled by immigrant workers first be advertised extensively in the U.S. to give Americans an opportunity. With unemployment in the U.S. and Long Island at nearly 10 percent, Ms. Hildesheim surmised that the Labor Department may be looking to make some H-2B jobs more attractive to Americans, at the expense of some small employers who may be stretched financially already.

“If you advertise $18 an hour for unskilled positions then, yeah, you’ll have Americans answer,” she said. “But our employers can’t afford to pay that much and stay in business. They will have to raise prices and they will lose customers.”

But U.S. Representative Tim Bishop said this week that the motivation for the labor department was not unemployment or reducing the number of immigrant laborers coming to the U.S. but a belief that H-2B workers are taken advantage of by employers. The view is a misplaced one, he said, at least locally.
“Here on Long Island we have workers that return year after year and they are taken care of very well by their employers,” Congressman Bishop said. “In other parts of the country there may be some issue, but I can say that is decidedly not the case here.”

Mr. Bishop said he is considering sponsoring a bill that could nullify the new wage rules by cutting off the funding to enforce it.

The Department of Labor does not need any Congressional or legislative approval to implement the rule, though Congress could pass legislation countermanding the rule, as the Republican majority in the House of Representatives is currently attempting to do with several Environmental Protection Agency regulations.

The new wage structure was to go into effect on September 31. A group of employers, primarily large farm and sugar harvesting companies and a national hoteliers organization, filed a lawsuit earlier this month challenging the new wage requirement structure. Since then the Department of Labor has announced that it is delaying the implementation of the rule 60 days, until November 30, to hear objections to the new wages.

Employers who rely on H-2B workers have feared for the stability of their critical labor supply in the past. Political wrangling over broader immigration rules threatened to end the H-2B program altogether in recent years, before Mr. Bishop and other federal representatives from seasonal areas mounted a concerted push to secure the program.