Seasonal Worker Coalition Calls on Congress for Immediate Action
OCTOBER 8, 2007. The American Hotel & Lodging Association (AH&LA) today announced that the H-2B Workforce Coalition, co-chaired by AH&LA, has delivered a letter urging immediate action on the Save Our Small and Seasonal Business Act of 2007 to each of the 100 members of the United States Senate and 435 members of the House of Representatives.
The letter asks for immediate passage of the legislation to renew the relief provision for the H-2B visa program and was signed by over 600 representatives of the lodging, restaurant, landscaping, seafood, and numerous other industries which rely heavily on temporary seasonal labor.
The H-2B visa program, operated through the combined efforts of the Departments of Labor, Homeland Security, and State, is utilized heavily by hoteliers, who often spend thousands of dollars and many hours in aggressive recruiting campaigns attempting to hire Americans for short-term seasonal jobs. When employers are unable to find U.S. workers, they must turn to the federal government's H-2B worker program in order to legally obtain short-term workers.
'It is absolutely imperative that the House and Senate act on this legislation immediately,' said Joe McInerney, AH&LA president and chief executive officer. 'The H-2B program is crucial for hoteliers - and for employers in numerous other industries - who utilize this program to meet their seasonal staffing needs, and which allows them to retain their full-time staff year-round. The first 33,000 H-2B visas for FY 2008 were already allocated by September 27 - three days before the start of the fiscal year - and unless this relief legislation is passed, many employers will be unable to hire the temporary seasonal workers so vital to the sustainability of their businesses, and many in fact may face severe economic hardship and forced to lay off full-time permanent employees.'
The number of H-2B visas is capped at 66,000 visas per year, a number that has not been adjusted since the visa category was initially capped in 1990. After intense lobbying by AH&LA and others, the Save Our Small and Seasonal Businesses Act of 2005 was introduced by Sen. Barbara Mikulski in the Senate and Rep. Bart Stupak (R-Mich.) in the House of Representatives.
This legislation provided emergency relief to the H-2B program and seasonal employers who rely on seasonal business for their survival by exempting from the cap prior H-2B workers who were counted against the annual cap in one of the previous three years and successfully complied with all program requirements. This provision was temporary and
initially expired on September 30, 2006. The additional one-year exemption which had been provided expired on September 30, 2007.
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