04/25/08 What About Workers?

What about workers? I'm Greg Martin with today's Fruit Grower Report. I sure wish this crystal ball I bought had a fine tuning knob. I keep asking it to show me what the worker situation will be this season and all I get is static. In fact that is pretty much what everyone is getting these days when talking labor. Congressman Doc Hastings says there is still some talk going around. HASTINGS: Trying to enact some narrow legislation but there's been push back on that which I anticipated that may need to be much more comprehensive but there are discussions going on but on the same token we are in a situation where it is starting to get late in the sessions to get anything enacted before we really get into the heavy presidential time period and that would be this summer. The whole issue of the no-match letters keeps coming up HASTINGS: The department has been very clear that they are going to follow what is existing laws and do the no-match but if I'm not mistaken the no-match has not been resolved by the courts yet. The Bush Administration wants to use these letters as evidence that employers knowingly hired undocumented workers. The DHS rule states that if workers named in the letter are unable to correct their Social Security records within a 90-day period, the employer must fire them or risk being prosecuted for violating immigration laws. The problem is that the letters make no statement regarding a worker's immigration status. SSA databases that generate no-match letters do not even contain complete or accurate information about workers' immigration status. And, of the 17.8 million discrepancies in the SSA database that could result in a no-match letter, 12.7 million (or over 70 percent) pertain to native-born U.S. citizens. That's today's Fruit Grower Report. I'm Greg Martin on the Northwest Ag Information Network.