The federal government’s rules to determine how much temporary foreign workers should be paid in Louisiana’s crawfish-processing industry violates an appeals court decision and is depressing wages for U.S. workers, according to a new lawsuit.
Crawfish industry workers and groups such as the New Orleans Workers Center for Racial Justice filed the federal lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia on April 27. The lawsuit seeks to invalidate a federal Department of Labor rule allowing the seafood processors to rely on state wage surveys rather than a large-scale federal study, the Occupational Employment Statistics (OES) survey.
In recent years, the Labor Department allowed the state’s crawfish industry to set wages for the temporary foreign workers using a study carried out by Louisiana State University, the complaint states. Of the 70 licensed employers in the state LSU tried to contact, only four responded, according to the lawsuit.
“DOL’s rule incentivizes employers to find ways to submit surveys with lower results,” Elizabeth Leiserson, an attorney with Southern Migrant Legal Services, said in a statement. “The small number of employers surveyed in Louisiana raises serious questions about whether the survey is statistically reliable – but DOL lets employers rely on it anyway.”
The same issue – how prevailing wages in the industry are determined – hurts seafood workers in Maryland, North Caroline and Virginia as well, the lawsuit says. In many cases, the pay of these workers in Louisiana and the other three states would have been 25 percent higher if the federal government’s wage survey had been employed, the complaint says.
“U.S. companies are exploiting H2B visa workers and underpaying them for their labor,” Ursula Price, executive director of the New Orleans Workers Center for Racial Justice, told the Louisiana Record in an email. “When one group of workers is underpaid, it depresses the entire wage market, and all workers pay the price.”
The domino effect of such decisions can weigh heavily on the overall economy, according to Price.
“We have learned an important economic lesson – allowing worker exploitation ruins the entire economy,” she said.
The lawsuit also points out that seven years ago, the Third U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals struck down the use of employer-based wage surveys as a substitute for the OEM survey, finding that the process encouraged companies to undercut prevailing pay levels.
“Allowing employers to use their own surveys when a valid OES wage rate is available allows the importation of foreign workers at wages that adversely affect the wages and working conditions of similarly employed U.S. workers in direct violation of the statutes and regulations governing the H-2B (visa) program,” the complaint says.