Crunch time to address lack of new prevailing wage survey

The Saipan Chamber of Commerce has asked Gov. Eloy S. Inos to request the U.S. Labor and Homeland Security departments to continue to accept the 2011 CNMI prevailing wage surveys in support of work visa applications until the Chamber completes a new survey later this year and after the minimum wage had already increased by 50 cents to $6.05 an hour.

As of yesterday, there’s no telling whether the two federal agencies will approve of any such request at a time when a number of H visa applications from the CNMI have already been rejected over a lack of a current prevailing wage survey.

The Saipan Chamber of Commerce will be funding the new prevailing wage survey at a hefty cost of $21,000 after failing to secure grants from either the U.S. Department of the Interior or the CNMI Department of Commerce.

Chamber president Alex Sablan said in an interview that discussions with U.S. Labor revealed that even if a new prevailing wage survey is completed soon, the agency “will not consider it” after Sept. 30 because by then the minimum wage has already changed from $5.05 an hour to $6.05 an hour and employers may have changed the wages not only of minimum wage earners but others as well.

“So we want to wait for the wage increase to happen. In the meantime, what we’re asking the governor to do, and we wrote him a letter, is to get a waiver to continue to support the CNMI’s and Chamber’s prevailing wage survey from 2011 because of the [Sept. 30] wage increase and DOL may not agree to accepting a report that has wages increasing,” Sablan told Saipan Tribune.

The Saipan Chamber of Commerce, the largest business organization in the CNMI, believes it is important to have a prevailing wage that is “commensurate to the facts and circumstances surrounding wages here in the CNMI as well as that H1B and H2B visas be an accessible economic tool for qualified and experienced workforce where no qualified U.S. citizen is available in our region.”

The business group will be contacting its members for their financial support to fund the prevailing wage survey, and that amount will be added to existing Chamber funds. It will continue, however, to apply for local and federal grants for the survey.

Only about 1 percent of the estimated 10,000 foreign workers in the CNMI were applied for and were granted H visas since late 2009, but officials hope that the five-year extension of the CW program will be used not only to train U.S. workers but also to transition valuable and qualified CW workers into nonimmigrant or immigrant visa classifications available under the Immigration and Nationality Act.

From Nov. 28, 2009, to March 31, 2014, there were 230 applications for H1B and H2B visas from CNMI employers, data from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services shows. Of these H visa applications, 136 or 59 percent were approved. Seventy-nine applications were denied.

A spike in the number of H visa applications is expected because of construction projects on the pipeline but the approval rate would depend, among other things, on the availability of a new prevailing wage survey. CNMI employers said they cannot use Guam’s prevailing wage survey because the wages in Guam are much higher than those in the Commonwealth.