Geddy’s Pub in Bar Harbor has an international flair in summer, but not because of the menu. Eastern European workers make up 40 to 50 percent of the summer workforce, said manager Sam Richardson.
“We have a very international staff,” Richardson said.
His workers come through a visa program known as H-2B, which provides temporary foreign labor to seasonal U.S. employers. In Maine, the program has grown popular among tourist, seafood, and forestry industry employers who can’t find U.S. labor. Foreign workers have become invaluable now that Maine’s tourist season extends into the fall, past when college students work.
But Richardson and other coastal employers may be scrambling for workers next summer because a returning worker exemption built into the H-2B program recently expired. Under the provision, previous H-2B workers returning to the same jobs aren’t counted toward the annual 66,000 H-2B visa cap. That provision expired this fall and Congress has failed to renew it, so far.
Recently, Labor Department officials said the cap for the first half of 2008 already has been met. That makes managers like Richardson nervous.
“We’re still kind of in limbo,” he said.
He’s not alone. According to the website of Maine Sen. Olympia Snowe, 230 Maine businesses employed more than 3,000 H-2B workers in 2005. Coastal innkeepers are already looking for employment alternatives for next summer, said Greg Dugal, the Maine Innkeepers Association’s executive director. A similar lapse in the returning worker provision in 2005 caught innkeepers off-guard, Dugal said.
“That pretty much sent everybody into scramble mode,” he said.
Some turned to the J-1 visa program, which also provides foreign workers. But the J-1 is only for foreign college students, and the visa’s duration is shorter than the Maine tourist season.
The Senate tacked an extension of the H-2B returning worker exemption onto a Justice and Commerce Department budget bill, but the House did not. In mid-November the two sides were still negotiating the provision. Even if the exemption does pass Congress, President Bush has threatened to veto the bill, not because of the H-2B provision, but because of other spending concerns.
Such Capitol Hill gridlock has seafood processors like Drusilla Ray, owner of Cherry Point products in Milbridge, expecting the worst.
“I’m locked out until I don’t know when,” Ray said.
Ray and her husband began using H-2B workers for their sea cucumber processing plant to ensure a legal and steady supply of workers. Until recently, H-2B workers made up 16 out of the 66 workers employed on the line, Ray said. Now, because the quota cap has been met, there are none.
Maine’s congressional delegation backs the returning worker provision, but some in Congress with strong union ties worry the program provides little incentive for employers to compete for U.S. workers. Technically, employers must pay the same wage to U.S. and foreign H-2B workers, but that doesn’t always happen in practice. A Congressional Research Service report found that 96.9 percent of all Vermont H2B workers in 2006 were contracted to receive wages below average for their occupation and 21.7 percent were contracted to receive wages below entry level.
Such disparities also happen in other states. In Maine, for example, 2006 Department of Labor data showed the Mira Monte Inn in Bar Harbor received approval to hire 5 H-2B housecleaners at $8 an hour, 50 cents less than the prevailing wage of $8.50 an hour.
Some union leaders argue the H-2B program amounts to little more than a business subsidy. If the program weren’t in place, businesses would be forced to pay living wages.
“There’s nobody out there to work because you make it not profitable,” said Damon Hall, a New England industry analyst for the International Association of Ironworkers.
Opponents of the H-2B program argue that if employers can’t find work locally, they should instead seek workers within more economically depressed regions of the United States.
But Dugal said innkeepers have tried that; employment agencies regularly match displaced millworkers in northern Maine with seasonal employers on the coast. But a high cost of living and seasonal employment make it unprofitable for northern Maine workers to voluntarily displace themselves.
In Maine, Dugal said, the H-2B program is a last resort for employers. If they could find labor inside the country instead of going through a bureaucratic visa process, they would — especially now.
“It would be much easier to hire a cook at 12 or 13 bucks an hour who is a local person,” he said.
If the H-2B program doesn’t get fixed soon, that may be just what employers do. It remains to be seen if they will have any takers.