Palacios says ‘unified plan’ needed to address CW issue

The chairman of the Senate Committee on Federal Relations and Independent Agencies is urging for a “unified plan” among stakeholders to address the shortfall of workers in the CNMI ahead of the expiration of the local contract worker program in 2019.

Sen. Arnold Palacios (R-Saipan) says the CNMI needs to sit down with its leaders and determine the way forward, as it is also a congressional and federal policy issue.

Palacios said “hard numbers” need to found and looked at for a “unified plan to put in place in a short period of time.” That can come from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the CNMI Labor Department.

According to Palacios, Esther Kia’aina, U.S. Department of the Interior Assistant Secretary for Insular Areas, is advocating that they all agree on a plan to address the worker shortfall. Kia’aina also urged that they seek an audience with the U.S. Congress.

Palacios noted that Delegate Gregorio Kilili C. Sablan (Ind-MP) will play a “significant part…in this narrative.”

“2019 is a hard date,” Palacios told reporters last week. “It’s in the law,” referring to U.S. Public Law 110-229.

“I know there have been a lot of efforts from the college, the Department of Labor, [the Northern Marianas Technical Institute], and other non-government agencies that are doing training like Latte Training Academy to help with the hospitality industry and whatnot. But at the end of the day, do we really have the population to support that economic initiative that we would like to see in the Commonwealth? Those are the hard questions we have to ask ourselves,” he said.

“There needs to be a policy analysis component that is missing at the moment,” Kia’ana told reporter last weeks, referring to how the CNMI currently suffers from a lack of federal and local data. How many of the labor force is unemployed or how educated is the population, or even the current population count, are simple but crucial points to begin planning.

Kia’aina said the CW program issue is the “top priority” of the CNMI.

A total of 14,000 CW visas were allotted in 2014, according to Homeland Security statistics. In 2010, the total number of unemployed U.S. workers in the CNMI amounted to only about 20 percent of its 14,958 foreign workers, according to U.S. Department of Labor. That means even if all unemployed U.S. workers join the labor force, more than 11,000 jobs would still need to be filled by foreign workers.