CNMI Labor’s urgent tasks
UNDER the new administration, workforce development will remain one of the top goals of the local labor department. To know more about this issue, the department’s new leadership should be aware of the actual experiences of legitimate employers who, amid a labor shortage, are trying to hire workers while complying with all the restrictions imposed by faraway government bureaucrats, some of whom know next to nothing about the CNMI.
To be sure, local workforce training and apprenticeship programs should be pursued, but local labor officials should also be familiar with CNMI demographics. Consider, for example, the information shared by NMTech recently. The trade school has 52 construction students who will graduate in October. Good news indeed, and good job NMTech! We hope all these students will finish their course and seek jobs — on island. But then again, in 2022, NMTech said there were “8,093 job openings in construction and extraction.”
And that’s just construction and extraction. What about healthcare and care giving? Hotels, restaurants and other service-oriented businesses?
Here’s another friendly reminder to the labor department’s new leadership: the Commonwealth is competing for the same workers who are also badly needed by other territories and states of the U.S. where the pay and the standard of living are way higher than the CNMI’s. Why? Because they have larger and ever growing economies.
As for “protecting workers” — right now, the best way to do that is to protect their jobs by not imposing new costs and/or restrictions on their already struggling employers.
Regarding medical referrals
PROPOSING drastic changes to medical referral services is the third rail of local politics. It is political suicide to recommend significant cuts to a long-standing program that is literally a matter of life and death for many voters.
But then and now, funding medical referrals has been a challenge, more so whenever the local economy is down and cannot generate sufficient revenue for the perennially bloated and constantly overreaching CNMI government.
The latest “solution” is, essentially, to rename the program, and return it to the government’s public health entity, CHCC. In 2013, due to (what else) funding problems, the program was transferred to the governor’s office. As public health officials have repeatedly pointed out in the past, the Legislature had never fully funded the medical referral program, and the governor (whoever he was) ended up reprogramming funds to pay for medical referrals. Some lawmakers would then complain about “deficits” while saying that the government should “protect” the program which they did not fully fund. (It may be difficult to come up with a profession more ridiculous than politics.)
Ideally, in any case, the medical referral program “is a resource of last resort.” Moreover, as CHCC has said, “it is not a payer, it is not an insurance company. There is a limitation.”
Ideally, too, the government should not be an employment agency for political supporters and other voters — and CHCC should be financially independent by now.
Ideally.
However, “no matter where you put the medical referral program,” as a former administration official has said, “it will always be a political issue because the patients will always reach out to their elected leaders.”
How many of them would dare say no?
