DOLI gets poor rating from businessmen

Inefficient, very slow, prejudiced and too bureaucratic — this was how the members of Saipan Chamber of Commerce rated the performance of the Department of Labor and Immigration.

Unfortunately, DOLI Secretary Mark Zachares was not there to clarify various issues namely, the never ending delays in the processing of documents, bonding fees, deportation of non resident workers, amnesty and the influx of undocumented immigrants to the CNMI.

Chamber members expressed disappointment when DOLI Secretary Mark Zachares canceled his scheduled talk during its monthly Wednesday meeting.

Acting Chamber president Gregg Kresge said Zachares who had earlier confirmed his attendance in the meeting, canceled his appointment because he had to rush to Tinian to attend to some emergency matters.

“We are not here to merely criticize. We will offer solutions to these problems because the private sector is a partner of the government,” said Kresge. The recommendations of Chamber members on how to make the department more efficient will be submitted to Zachares.

Carmen Gaskins, resident manager of Hansae (Saipan), questioned the bonding requirement which mandates employers to pay for the bonding fee while documents of the worker are being processed. However, when the worker changes his mind to come to the CNMI, the company will not be able to recover the bonding fee.

“This can be avoided by allowing us only to pay for the bonding fee as soon as the employee arrives on the island,” said Gaskins.

On the controversial Resident Workers Act, Bob Jones, president of Triple J, said his company is willing to provide locals the same benefits given to the non resident workers as long as the loopholes in the new law are solved first.

During the discussion, another Chamber member questioned the length of time it takes DOLI to process documents for the hiring of workers including the Job Vacancy Announcement procedure.

At the same time, they questioned why DOLI imposes its own set of qualifications in different job categories when it comes to hiring of workers. “We know better what qualifications must be met because we’re the one’s hiring these people,” the member said.

Prejudice exist in DOLI. When it comes to processing of documents, a company executive said she could not understand why her Filipino secretary constantly finds difficulty in submitting documents to the department. “Whenever I send her there even if the documents are already complete, there was never a time that she won’t be sent back because of problems in the documents. But when I bring the same documents myself, they don’t have any complaints,” she said.

Another company president described how she found difficulty in taking back the documents submitted to DOLI when they decided to hire a local instead of a Japanese. “We found it hard to get back the documents because the Japanese had strong connections in the department. The fact that some people can pull strings there opens the possibility of corruption,” the company official said.