“Barry is our only ‘spare’ hearing officer, as we cannot afford to hire outside lawyers. He is an excellent lawyer and has long experience as a hearing officer,” she told Variety in an e-mail.
Kaipat also confirmed the appointment of Glenda Reyes, a supervisor of the processing section, as temporary acting director while Hirshbein is with the hearing office.
Reyes helped implement Labor’s very successful automation project, Kaipat said.
The supervisory duties of Reyes were shifted to Jeffrey Camacho, enforcement section head, who helped clean up old labor cases over the past two years, Kaipat said.
She said Labor has been maximizing its personnel to attend continually to the operations of the department.
From 85 personnel in 2006, she added, Labor has 41 left but is still fast-tracking old bonding claims.
“We have published two notices with respect to old bonding claims, and we expect to publish two more in the near future, so we can deal with these claims in an orderly way,” she said.
Labor is expecting its hearing office to finish all the old bonding claims by September.
Labor should be able to complete all appeals on old bonding claims by October, she said.
Under the new labor law, or P.L. 15-108, foreign workers must make their claims within six months of the employer conduct they are complaining about and within 30 days after the termination of their contract.
Kaipat said this means that complaints are resolved promptly, and Labor will not have problems with employers who have already disappeared over the years that it formerly took to get a claim adjudicated.
“We also don’t have the problem of disappearing insurance companies. The Department of Commerce is doing a good job of monitoring those companies,” she said.
According to Kaipat, Labor will finish the last of the 2008 cases before June 30, 2009.
“We expect that there will be very few bonding claims from those cases. The department will be able to stay entirely current on bonding claims once we get by this temporary backlog,” she said.
