Lobster industry turns to foreign workers

“Good people have full-time jobs,” Reynolds said.

So six years ago, he began looking abroad for some of his workforce. He worked with an international hiring agency to recruit foreign students who held J-1 visas to work during school vacation months. This year, he employed six Serbs. Reynolds said it’s been an ideal solution. The J-1 visa workers he’s employed mainly have been reliable and hard workers, and they then go home.

“You don’t have to lay them off or anything,” he said.

Using foreign workers has become commonplace in the coastal tourist industry. Non-native workers often make up the bulk of the workforce in the fish-processing and blueberry industries, as well. But foreign labor is still a new phenomenon in Maine’s lobster wholesale industry.

Portland lobster dealer and Maine Import Export Dealers’ Association president Peter McAleney said he hadn’t heard of many dealers turning to foreign labor. Sometimes, he’s heard of dealers importing Canadian fishermen after the Canadian fishing season ends, but not of employers looking overseas. But it doesn’t surprise him that dealers are desperate for workers.

“We didn’t have anybody for the summer,” McAleney said. “There’s not too many good workers left.”

Foreign guest worker programs have been mired in the national immigration reform debate, and the visa programs often are treated like a political football, said Jorge Acero, a foreign labor specialist with the Maine Department of Labor.

During George W. Bush’s presidency, the U.S. government streamlined rules to make it easier to employ foreign workers, despite protests from labor unions and some state labor agencies that doing so would mean employers would hire foreign workers over domestic-born ones because foreign workers were cheaper.

“The H2A rules really got put through the grinder in the Bush administration,” Acero said.

The Obama administration has been working to strengthen the rules and make sure employers try to fill positions with domestic workers first, Acero said.

However, under the rules of the J-1 program, employers don’t have to advertise locally to fill the positions before receiving J-1 workers.

Under the rules of the J-1 visa program, the workers can’t return each year. The rules are different for the H2A visa program for foreign agricultural workers and H2B visa program for temporary workers in non-agricultural jobs. That means J-1s may be limited in their usefulness to pure grunt work, rather than jobs that require more training, like grading, according to McAleney.

“It takes a year to train somebody…unless it’s just loading the boats,” he said.

Foreign workers don’t always work out. Lobster Web Company LLC employed several legal foreign workers from Haiti this summer at its Stonington site, but only briefly.

“They were only here for a week and they were looking for bigger and better,” said Amelia Larrabee, an office manager for the company in Stonington.

For some companies however, foreign employees have been ideal. Young’s Lobster Pound in Belfast has been using legal foreign workers for 10 years, said co-owner Dianne Parker. This year she’s employed six foreign workers. In the past, workers have come from all over the world, including Latvia and Turkey.

Foreign workers have been invaluable in Parker’s restaurant and with her lobster-dealing business because she said she never could get enough reliable domestic-born workers.

“They may get a paycheck or two, but then when the first sunny day comes and they’re gone,” Parker said.

The foreign workers are willing to do the dirty, hard work, she said. “They will do anything we ask them to do.”

But both Acero and labor advocate Sarah Bigney believe domestic workers would fill manual labor positions if wages were raised. Bigney, an organizer with the non-profit Maine Fair Trade Campaign, said employers often like to say they need foreign workers because they can’t find domestic-born help, but it’s not true.

“It’s a total myth,” Bigney said. “What we pride ourselves on in Maine is hard work.”

Employers would attract more local help if they paid a livable wage, she argued. Many people can earn more on unemployment than on jobs requiring manual labor in Maine, said Bigney.

Acero believes employers might want to think about raising wages to attract higher-quality domestic-born workers because it might benefit them more than bringing in foreign laborers in the long run.

“There might be some losses at first, but they might get a reliable workforce,” Acero said.

But such a long-term solution might be hard to put into action for many Maine seasonal employers at the beginning of the summer, when cash flow is low and job vacancies need to be filled.

Craig Idlebrook is a freelance writer living in Somerville, Mass.