“We ask that the OSHA officer(s) you send here be selected from among senior staff with positive records of aggressive enforcement of the Act,” the coalition said in its letter to U.S Department of Labor Secretary Elaine L. Chao.
OSHA aims to promote and improve standards for occupational safety and health.
The coalition also wants to see the presence of the U.S. Commission for Occupational Safety and Health in the CNMI.
The commission, according to its Web site, is an independent federal agency created to decide contests of citations or penalties resulting from OSHA inspections of work places.
The commission functions as an administrative court, with established procedures for conducting hearings, receiving evidence and rendering decisions by its administrative law judges.
Irene Tantiado, then the coalition’s president, also asked Chao to assign an additional, permanent, full-time Wage Hour Division compliance officers and support staff who can enforce the Fair Labor Standards Act in the CNMI.
She told Chao that many guest workers have been “victims of systematic exploitation and abuse by unscrupulous employers.”
“We have been discriminated against, intimidated and harassed by virtually every agency of the CNMI government that has authority to regulate our employment,” she added.
Unlawful discrimination is widespread here, Tantiado said, adding that employers unlawfully and regularly discriminate on the basis of age, sex and race.
“CNMI laws operate to discriminate against guest workers on the basis of national origin,” she claimed.
She cited a case involving a nonresident accountant who was refused to operate a bookkeeping/payroll service for small companies after office hour and or during weekends because under CNMI law, business licenses are not issued to foreigners.
“A clear case of national origin discrimination,” she said.
As guests in the CNMI, Tantiado said, nonresident workers maintain high standards of personal character and work performance and have made solid contributions to the economy of the commonwealth.
But Tantiado said the enforcement of the Fair Labor Standards Act was hindered due to limited number of Wage Hour Division officers assigned to cover Guam and the CNMI.
Since the enactment of U.S. P.L. 110-229, which will federalize local immigration, the CNMI’s Wage-Hour office has been telling complainants to wait until the U.S. Department of Labor “takes over,” Tantiado said.
“Many recent complaints of unpaid wages originate in the unlawful, immoral practice of reducing or eliminating contractual benefits with every 50-cent increase in the CNMI’s minimum wage,” she added.
Tantiado noted that as part of a $20 million settlement agreement to resolve an extended dispute involving thousands of guest workers who were cheated by employers in the now-defunct garment industry, the U.S. District Court for the NMI announced last month that 29,800 checks have been mailed to former guest workers who have left the islands.
The coalition is also asking U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission Chairwoman Naomi C. Earp to assign at least one permanent, full-time investigator/compliance agent with staff support to work in the CNMI and enforce unlawful discrimination rules.
“We earnestly ask that as the U.S. Department of Labor assumes increased responsibilities here, that the employees you assign here will be particularly sensitive to the fact that we guest workers came here to earn a living doing jobs that the local workforce could not fill. The wages we earn are higher than in our home countries, but none of us have become wealthy working here,” she said.
