Foreign Labor

Sometimes, in his off hours, Yie Eun-woong does a bit of investigative work. He uses the Internet and other means to track personal data and home addresses of foreign English teachers across South Korea. Then he follows them, often for weeks at a time, staking out their apartments, taking notes on their contacts and habits. He wants to know whether they're doing drugs or molesting children. Yie, a slender 40-year-old who owns a temporary employment agency, says he is only attempting to weed out troublemakers who have no business teaching students in South Korea, or anywhere else.

WASHINGTON - Senators writing a landmark immigration bill broke a logjam between farmworker unions and growers Thursday, reaching a tentative agreement on future agricultural visas and pay scales for foreign farmworkers, according to people familiar with the negotiations. Labor unions and agricultural industry leaders had been stuck for three weeks on how to legally bring foreign labor into the United States to pick crops and tend livestock at competitive wages. The issue, which is critical to California and other major farming states, became a major stumbling block in bipartisan efforts to craft a comprehensive immigration bill.

"Labor Market Sees Sweeping Changes as Firms Restructure" (Nov. 25) mentions that unless employees aren't willing to give up wages and benefits, certain companies will transfer their operations overseas where labor costs less and benefits are little or nonexistent. If these employees are out of work, they won't be able to buy any goods manufactured anywhere, let alone overseas. Do you think that if this trend continues and that our own U.S. government figures out that if the cost of running the government is too high, it too will transfer its operation overseas and run the government with foreign labor?

Business and labor leaders have hammered out the outline of a compromise on one of the hardest issues in reforming the nation's immigration system -- how to handle future needs for foreign workers in the U.S. Although both sides say key details remain to be negotiated, the deal clears away a significant roadblock to further action in Congress. The bipartisan group of eight senators, which has been crafting an immigration bill, plan to meet next week to discuss the issue. The senators have been waiting to see the results of the talks between the business and labor groups.

The federal government won't accept any more applications for a popular visa program that provides skilled foreign labor to U.S. companies, Citizenship and Immigration Services said. Less than five months into the fiscal year already there are enough applications to fill all 65,000 slots for H1-B visas, said Chris Bentley, a spokesman for the agency, a division of the Department of Homeland Security. The agency planned to stop accepting applications at the end of the day Tuesday.

Cesar Chavez, president of the United Farm Workers of America, said that his organization was stepping up its battle against growers' use of foreign workers, charging that claims of labor shortages were fictitious. Chavez presided over the UFW's biennial convention in McAllen, Tex., in the heavily agricultural lower Rio Grande Valley.

They toil in Taiwan's dirtiest and most difficult and dangerous jobs. Unlike migrants in many other parts of the world, foreign workers here are legal. But language barriers and the low social status imposed by their short-term contracts leave them vulnerable to job brokers and employers in a system that labor advocates say is rife with abuse.

Each day, Don Breingan watched the supply of leather, laces and stitching shrink at the Bangor factory of G. H. Bass & Co., the shoemakers. There had been no orders for new supplies, he noted. Rumors of a closing had circulated for months. Breingan began asking friends--salesmen familiar with the New England shoe industry--if they knew of other jobs. He spent nights chasing leads by phone.

Business as usual reigns in this desert sheikdom. Eight months after Saddam Hussein's Iraqi legions were repulsed, the passion, anxieties and dark-of-night retributions of the immediate postwar days have softened. Desert Storm camouflage has given way to blue suits of deal-makers from Europe, the United States and Japan. "Mad Max has gone," as one Western diplomat puts it, "and the carpetbaggers have taken over." Now, too, the grasp of bureaucracy is once again choking business enterprise.

A Ventura County Latino group called on Congressman Elton Gallegly to change his vote on a controversial bill that would allow thousands of foreign laborers to temporarily work in the nation's fields, arguing that such legislation is unnecessary and exploitative.

After years of shipping data-processing, accounting and other back-office work abroad, some healthcare companies are starting to shift clinical services and decision-making on medical care overseas, primarily to India and the Philippines. Some of the jobs being sent abroad include so-called pre-service nursing, in which nurses at insurance firms, for example, help assess patient needs and determine treatment methods. Outsourcing such tasks goes beyond earlier steps by healthcare firms to farm out reading of X-rays and other diagnostic tests to health professionals overseas.

Yin Shuilian is a fighter. For more than 11 years, the 45-year-old ethnic Korean tried to leave her hard life in China, where she toiled in fields and in restaurants, and make her way to South Korea. The move wasn't easy: She was repeatedly denied visas and cheated by unscrupulous brokers. At last, Yin arrived here in 1998 lugging not only her belongings but also $80,000 in debts to her friends and family. When her husband followed eight months later, the couple faced the challenge of their lives: They worked for six years to repay what they owed and begin a new life in their chosen homeland.

Sometimes, in his off hours, Yie Eun-woong does a bit of investigative work. He uses the Internet and other means to track personal data and home addresses of foreign English teachers across South Korea. Then he follows them, often for weeks at a time, staking out their apartments, taking notes on their contacts and habits. He wants to know whether they're doing drugs or molesting children. Yie, a slender 40-year-old who owns a temporary employment agency, says he is only attempting to weed out troublemakers who have no business teaching students in South Korea, or anywhere else.

As U.S. employers start applying today for visas for foreign workers, the hiring of talent from other countries is facing heightened scrutiny and the threat of greater restrictions as domestic unemployment soars. In recent years, the annual competition for 85,000 temporary work visas awarded to foreign computer technicians, engineers, university educators and other highly skilled professionals has drawn twice as many applications as spots available.

Hundreds of British workers walked off the job Monday, part of a rising tide of industrial unrest sweeping Europe as the continent's economic downturn worsens. Employees at two nuclear power plants in northern England staged wildcat strikes in support of workers at an oil refinery who have been out in protest since the end of last week.

For foreign professionals in the United States, the rising unemployment rate is especially daunting. Laid-off foreign workers are scrambling for temporary visas and seeking advice from immigration attorneys about how long they can legally stay in the country while hunting for jobs. Even some foreigners here on visas or work permits are switching employers, fearing that an unstable job during a recession could lead to a one-way ticket home or end their chance of getting a green card.

Leaving behind his pueblo in Guanajuato, Mexico, Jose Gasca traveled north across the border in the mid-1950s to pick fruit and vegetables in places he had never heard of -- Arkansas, Michigan, Arizona. Living and working conditions were grueling. He often slept in cramped barracks with dozens of other men and woke at dawn to toil 12 hours in the fields. Like his father before him, Gasca, now 70, was a bracero, a Mexican worker brought to the U.S.

After years of shipping data-processing, accounting and other back-office work abroad, some healthcare companies are starting to shift clinical services and decision-making on medical care overseas, primarily to India and the Philippines. Some of the jobs being sent abroad include so-called pre-service nursing, in which nurses at insurance firms, for example, help assess patient needs and determine treatment methods. Outsourcing such tasks goes beyond earlier steps by healthcare firms to farm out reading of X-rays and other diagnostic tests to health professionals overseas.

As it prepares to leave office, the Bush administration is moving to make it easier for U.S. farming companies to hire foreign workers, which farmworker groups say will worsen wages and working conditions. The farmworker groups said changes to the H2A visa program, used by the agriculture industry to hire temporary workers, were posted on the Labor Department's website at midnight Tuesday but later taken down.

If you prefer a customer service agent who speaks "American," then computer maker Dell Inc. has a deal for you. Catering to consumers put off by the accents of India, the Philippines and other call-center hubs around the globe, Dell will guarantee -- for a price -- that the person who picks up the phone on a support call will be, as company ads state in bold text, "based in North America." The Your Tech Team service, with agents located in the U.S., costs $12.