GOP tries to cut wages for Americans and H-2B workers

GOP Gives The Finger to America

• The open borders Republicans are always looking for new ways to drive down wages for their Masters on Wall Street.

(Breitbart)  -  The latest 1,305-page draft House appropriations bill for 2018 uses a bureaucratic trick on page 732 to help employers cut wages for foreign H-2B seasonal workers — and indirectly, also cut wages for American workers.

“Republicans in Congress still haven’t got the message that voters sent last November,” said Rosemary Jenks, director of government relations for NumbersUSA. She continued:

Americans elected President Trump because they are tired of the elites in Washington being more concerned with big-business profits than with regular American workers being able to make a living wage.  Wages [for Americans] in the top H-2B occupations [landscaping and hospitality] have been stagnant or declining for years, and this bill will make them worse.

Under current rules, employers can only apply for H-2B seasonal workers if they cannot hire Americans for the jobs, and they must promise to pay H-2B workers American-level wages when they ask the Department of Labor for H-2B visas.

The new language would help employers minimize wages for H-2B workers by allowing them to cite the results of skewed “private wage surveys” of local wages. The results of the surveys would be cited in the H-2B request instead of the actual “prevailing wage” rates for local Americans working the free market for labor.

This rule, if adopted, would also hit Americans because employers use their resident population of roughly 125,000 H-2B workers to deflate any bidding war for American seasonal workers. The rule would also hurt Americans because wages for each company’s full-time American staff are informally tied to the wages paid to the seasonal workers.

The process feeds back on itself because lower-H-2B wages reduce market-rate wages for Americans, so cutting the real “prevailing wage,” Jenks said. Also, when companies use H-2B workers to hold down prevailing wages, fewer Americans apply for the jobs — so helping companies claim they can’t find Americans to do the work. “Employers have been using H-2B workers to lower wages industry-wide for years — this lets them do it faster.”

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