Bush moves to help farmers hire more foreign field hands

WASHINGTON —  As it prepares to leave office, the Bush administration is moving to make it easier for U.S. farming companies to hire foreign workers, which farmworker groups say will worsen wages and working conditions.

The farmworker groups said changes to the H2A visa program, used by the agriculture industry to hire temporary workers, were posted on the Labor Department’s website at midnight Tuesday but later taken down.

Labor Department spokesman Terry Shawn said that whatever was posted wasn’t the final version of the new rule, which Shawn said would be released today and published in the Federal Register on Dec. 18.

The Bush administration published a proposed version of the new rule Feb. 13 and received nearly 12,000 public comments, Shawn said. The next version will be a final rule and can take effect 30 days after publication. Some of its provisions would take effect in mid-January and others later in the year, the farmworker groups said.

Farmworker advocates and the United Farm Workers union said the version that appeared on the website would lead to a flood of cheaper workers.

“The government has decided to offer agriculture employers really low wages, low benefits, no government oversight to bring in foreign workers on restricted visas and thereby convince them they should do this instead of hiring undocumented workers,” said Bruce Goldstein, executive director of Farmworker Justice, a group that advocates for farmworkers.

The changes in the posted version would drop a requirement that an employer get the Labor Department to certify that it faces a worker shortage before it can get visas for foreign workers. Instead, employers would be allowed to simply attest in writing to a shortage. That version of the new rule also would change the method for calculating wage minimums for workers and relieve employers of a requirement to recruit in states or communities where other employers already are hiring farmworkers, Goldstein said.

Paul Schlegel, public policy director for the American Farm Bureau, said many of the changes would make the program less burdensome for employers. He said existing laws prevented employers from hiring foreign workers if the jobs could be filled by U.S. workers.

“My members want to make sure they have a legal supply of labor,” said Schlegel, who added that he had not reviewed all of the proposed changes.

The rule changes are a part of a pattern of last-minute regulatory changes being rushed into effect by the Bush administration before President-elect Barack Obama’s Jan. 20 inauguration.

The effect is to make it harder for Obama to change course on some policies favored by Republicans and the business community.

“We are hopeful that the Obama administration would recognize the utter mistake and unfairness of this proposal,” Goldstein said. Congress has a procedure for reversing the rules, he said.