Employers

California's overhaul of its troubled workers' compensation insurance system has saved employers at least $8.1 billion over the last three years, and the benefits to the economy are expected to continue, according to a study sent to the governor and Legislature on Friday.

Business owner Tom Nogradi said he wanted to do the right thing. So when his employees admitted they were undocumented and asked for help applying for green cards, he agreed to sponsor them. But things didn't go as expected. Immigration agents raided Nogradi's Valencia company in 2000, looking for illegal workers. He lost 15 employees.

Like many communities, this fast-growing agricultural pocket of southwestern Idaho is paying a high tab for illegal immigration. When an illegal worker gave birth to a premature baby, Canyon County wound up with a $174,000 hospital bill. County officials say the jail spent thousands to house another illegal immigrant at a motel, after his tuberculosis threatened to infect fellow inmates.

Every year, the Social Security Administration collects information from companies that could make it easier to crack down on illegal immigration. A New Jersey labor broker and a security guard firm in California are among thousands of businesses that have filed Social Security tax payments for a large number of workers that do not match any known taxpayer. That, the Social Security agency says, is a sign that the workers are most likely illegal.

What with immigration being a hot topic these days, almost every constituency has weighed in on the subject of our porous borders. We've heard from workers; politicians left, right and center; the clergy; economists; labor organizers; newscasters and, yes, newspaper columnists. For many of them the question is the same: What should be done about these strangers in our midst? Now let's hear from an employer of immigrants. "My experience is that they're making a great contribution to the economy.

When Peter Smith, a senior immigration enforcement agent in upstate New York, led the raid on a cavernous IFCO Systems wood products plant just outside of Albany this week, he was taken aback by what he saw. "There was a lot of drilling, cutting, dismantling of old pallets, pneumatic nail guns, power saws. Most of these guys were working in jeans, tennis shoes, short-sleeve shirts; some had sawdust in their hair," he said. "No legal facility would let workers work in those conditions."

Dov Charney's loss for the day came to about $400,000, but he couldn't have been happier. While his workers gathered to march through downtown Los Angeles on Monday, Charney was a few miles away in his seven-story garment factory idled by the immigrant protest. The iconoclastic chief executive of American Apparel Inc. not only gave 3,300 of his employees the day off, but he also supplied them with T-shirts emblazoned with a pro-immigration message.

A growing number of American workers at companies offering health insurance are turning it down because of a 42% jump in recent premiums, a nonpartisan health think tank said Thursday. The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation said 3 million fewer workers eligible for employer-sponsored health plans enrolled in 2003 compared with 1998.

The latest indicator of the gay community's growing economic clout came Thursday in a report that found more than half of the nation's largest corporations now extend health insurance to employees' same-sex domestic partners. The Washington-based Human Rights Campaign Foundation found that the number of Fortune 500 companies offering this benefit had doubled in six years, even as voters and lawmakers in 45 states registered their opposition to gay marriage.

Independence Day falls on Tuesday this year, creating a dilemma for some local employers: What to do about Monday? Officially, Monday is a normal business day. Federal offices will be open as will almost all U.S. financial markets and most grocery stores, banks and other commercial establishments. Unofficially, it's a phantom holiday, like the day after Thanksgiving, dragging in the halfhearted, the workaholics and those who put in their vacation requests too late.