NMI labor and immigration get $600K grant

The U.S. Department of the Interior has awarded the CNMI a $600,000 grant to help beef up the processing of labor complaints, immigration hearings, and the handling of displaced workers.

The Attorney General’s Office announced yesterday that the grant will help provide funding for two hearing officers at the Department of Labor, as well as three attorneys and two paralegals dealing exclusively with labor and immigration issues at the AGO.

A total of $33,980 has also been set aside for training of new and current enforcement officers in the Labor Department.

“The Department of Labor has identified available funding to recruit a greater number of enforcement personnel to meet the CNMI’s goal of making labor law enforcement more effective and efficient,” said attorney general Pamela S. Brown.

Further, Karidat Social Services was awarded $100,000 to provide for food and housing costs of workers who have cases under review by Labor.

Incorporated in May 1980, Karidat is a non-profit social services organization under the Diocese of Chalan Kanoa. The group administers the Guest Worker Assistance Program providing temporary assistance to displaced guest workers with active labor cases.

The federal grant will provide much needed help for the Labor Department, which is experiencing a manpower shortage particularly in the investigation and hearing units.

Currently, the department has only one full-time hearing officer, Jerry Cody. The three other hearing officers—Linn Asper, Herb Soll, and Cinta Kaipat—are all working part-time.

The department also has only five investigators handling hundreds of complaints from the over 30,000 nonresident workers in the CNMI.

In a July interview, federal ombudsman Jim Benedetto noted that the delay in resolution of workers’ complaints is one of the major problems at the Labor Department.

“Thus far in 2004, Labor has had over 500 complaints filed. It doesn’t take a mathematician to figure out that that is probably too many complaints for five people to investigate and do so quickly,” he had noted.

He said that due to Labor’s manpower shortage, it is not uncommon for even simple workers’ complaints to take about six months to get acted upon.

Benedetto added that it usually takes another year or so for the hearing office to set a date for adjudication of the complaint and still two and a half more years to write an opinion saying that the working is going to be awarded his back wages.