Maryland seafood producers struggle mightily each year to find the 400 crab pickers they need for a crab season that runs from April 1 through November. They often place their hope in the H-2B visa lottery that allows them to recruit foreign workers for these temporary jobs. Yet this year, just one Maryland seafood producer out of the 10 that applied won the H-2B worker lottery, even as the administration released an additional 35,000 visas.
The H-2B visa program, once a necessary vehicle for helping employers find seasonal workers for jobs Americans didn’t want, has not only lost its focus; it has become a racket for disreputable employers — particularly in the landscaping and construction industries — to exploit labor at the expense of industries truly in need.
It’s undeniable that some industries still need seasonal labor that’s tough to come by in a tight labor market. In its original incarnation, that included the hospitality, landscaping and seafood industries. Yet Maryland seafood processors aren’t getting the visa allotments they need.
Why? Because landscaping and construction contractors hungry for cheap labor have found loopholes to abuse a system that lacks oversight and strong penalties for rule breakers.
The federal H-2B visa program requires employers to show they made a good-faith effort to find workers domestically but were unsuccessful. They have to show they exhausted all avenues to find and attract workers, but still came up empty. In a capitalist system governed by supply and demand, making the effort to attract workers should mean that employers make the jobs more attractive by making them more lucrative.
That isn’t what happens.
Construction companies trying to get in on the cheap labor pipeline make token efforts to recruit American workers, often placing tiny ads in little-read publications urging available workers to call a toll-free number that’s never answered. They justify their claim of a labor shortage by citing record low unemployment.
The numbers on a piece of paper may tell that story, but the reality on the ground is starkly different. We know. We’re there.
The Mid-Atlantic Region of the Laborers’ International Union of North America (LIUNA) is ready and willing to provide trained, hardworking American construction workers in Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia, North Carolina and the District of Columbia. We constantly reach out to landscaping and construction contractors who have applied for H-2B visas. We guarantee we can meet their labor needs with our domestic labor force.
Most of the time, they don’t even call us back.
In 2020, when COVID-19 struck and the federal government halted the H-2B program, contractors signed up with us in droves. Once the program started up again, many of them laid off their American workers in hopes of securing H-2B labor again. That sends only one message: These companies simply prefer cheap, exploitable labor.
The landscaping and groundskeeping industry, which benefits from the highest visa allotment in the H-2B visa scheme, can pay an H-2B visa worker on average $2.59 and $3.37 less per hour than a domestic worker. In construction, employers cut wages by 20% for H-2B visa holders.
Once the workers are here, they are easy to exploit because they are solely dependent on their employer for housing and transportation, and the program bars the worker from leaving one employer for another. With little oversight and no recourse for workers, employers can force these workers to work long hours without overtime, penalize them for calling in sick, and make them labor in unsafe conditions.
Construction work has always been a middle class job and should remain so. As long as construction contractors can hire H-2B workers for less when there are ready and available construction workers locally, the H-2B program threatens to undermine that.
Congress needs to act to ensure H-2B works as it was originally intended. It needs to close the loopholes, invest money in oversight and ensure that the penalties for violators are sufficiently steep that companies can’t simply write it off as the cost of doing business.
Most importantly, Congress must take a hard look at the industries H-2B visas currently support and ensure that they are truly worthy and in need of this benefit. There are businesses that do need and should receive seasonal labor through the program. If the program works properly, those needs will be met, and not at the expense of the American worker.
Dennis L. Martire (dmartire@maliuna.org) is the vice president and Mid-Atlantic Regional Manager of the Laborers’ International Union of North America.
