NALP has secured an important meeting with a senior staff member at the Department of Homeland Security. The meeting is scheduled for early February and will allow us to further illustrate the critical role that H-2B serves in filling the workforce needs of landscape professionals and other seasonal employers and to voice our extreme concerns regarding the pending potential labor crisis our profession is facing if cap-relief is not provided in 2018.
To underscore the serious nature of the situation, we will present a collection of stories from members who have previously been impacted by the cap or fear that they will be in 2018 unless relief to the cap is provided. To that end, we ask all NALP members who use a seasonal workforce to submit their experiences for inclusion in the collection.
Please send us information that underscores the critical role and workforce certainty that are provided through H-2B. We also want to present information that rebuts claims related to H-2B being a cheap labor source that takes jobs away from American workers. We would appreciate you sharing information such as:
- The number of fulltime workers you employ
- How you handle business if you do not receive requested H-2B workers
- If you did not receive workers in 2017, were you forced to lay off workers, cancel contracts, lose clients, or take other action that negatively affected your business?
- What you do to recruit local labor
- Experiences that illustrate the difficulty in retaining local labor
- Estimated contracts or clients lost due to not getting H-2B workers
- Anything else of relevance that personally illustrates the importance of H-2B to your company and the American workers that you employ fulltime.
Please note, if you are skittish about including your name or company name and wish to remain anonymous then by all means do so. The information that you provide and your real-world examples are what we are hoping to capture and present. We do ask that a minimum you include your state and Congressional district so that we are best able to demonstrate that this is not an isolated problem.
We hope that you will consider this request and help us to “tell your H-2B story” directly to DHS and other senior administration officials. Please send your information to Paul Mendelsohn no later than close of business on Friday February 2nd. Thanks for your assistance, rest assured that we understand that failure is not an option and we will relentlessly continue our pursuit of short term cap relief and long-term program reform!
