Employers with illegal workers get reprieve
All the undocumented workers and their employers in the U.S. can breath a collective sigh of relief.
Turns out “no match” is a “no go” at least for now.
Last week, a federal judge put the temporary kibosh on
a new Department of Homeland Security rule that would have cracked down on businesses that hired illegal-immigrant workers.
In an unusual twist, labor and business leaders got together to fight the rule and ended up getting their way for now with the granting of an injunction nationwide.
The way the no match rule would have worked is simple: If an employee's name and Social Security number did not match government records, the employer would receive a letter from the government advising that employer they had 90 days to figure out the problem or can the employee. If the business ignored the letter they could be fined up to $10,000 per infraction.
This is a touchy subject with businesses. No one wants to admit they employ illegal workers and business/labor advocates walk a fine line when deciding how much to fight regulations like this.
When
I blogged about this last time,
the National Federation of Independent Businesses said it was taking a wait-and-see approach.
But now, with the injunction, everyone feels a bit better about dogging the rule.
"The court's decision is encouraging for small-business owners. The court seriously questions whether the Department of Homeland Security violated the Regulatory Flexibility Act when the agency issued the final ‘no match’ letter procedures. The court understands that this rule if enacted would likely cause significant harm to innocent employers and workers,” according to Karen Harned, executive director of the NFIB’s Legal Foundation.
Labor’s argument has been that employers would use the no match rule to fire employees who were trying to organize unions.
The President of
the AFL-CIO, which was one of the organizations behind the lawsuit, said:
“This is a significant step towards overturning this unlawful rule, which would give employers an even stronger way to keep workers from freely forming unions. More than 70 percent of SSA discrepancies refer to U.S. citizens, and…the mailing of the new ‘no match’ letters would result in irreparable harm to innocent workers and employers.”
It’s unclear how these letters would have been used. And it seems odd that labor would want to derail a rule that would possibly create more jobs for U.S. workers.
The more I think about it, the more I think there’s a strong undercurrent of “keep the status quo” when it comes to the immigration issue.
Millions of illegal workers are toiling away in businesses across the country. We all know it. We all see them.
I’m guessing, no one really has the heart to do anything that would force us to make that serious of a change to the nation’s economic structure.
