EEOC Nominee Discusses H2A Violations

This week, the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions held a hearing on the nominations for leadership positions in the Department of Labor and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

Andrea Lucas, Acting Chair of the EEOC who has served the Commission since 2020,  defended the EEOC’s actions on employers violating the use of H1A and H1B visas for foreign workers.

Sen. Jim Banks, R - Indiana: “Can you walk me through some of the trends that you're seeing on that front and cases like those? And what is what motivates that discrimination?

Andrea Lucas, Acting Chair, EEOC: “Yeah, it can be found in almost in every industry. How it plays out varies. I think that when you look at warehouse businesses, agricultural manufacturing, it is often Hispanic preference. But sometimes it is a, is another, another preference for foreign workers. Either way, it is often motivated either by racial bias, the assumption that a particular, racial group that you're bringing in of an immigrant will be, more motivated than the local white or black, workforce, and sometimes it's it's motivated by economic, arbitrage, the sense that you'll be able to pay them less because at any point you could deport them. We’ve seen everything from, again, Hispanic worker preference to importing workers from the Philippines, that they can, on visas that they can at a moment's notice, get deported, revoke their visa, or move them all over the country. We also have seen it in the tech industry in particular, with preference for H-1b visa workers at the expense of, again, local local workers. So it can come up in both high skill work, forces as well as, your, frontline manufacturing jobs. It can also come up in terms of, company towns where, instead of employing hard working Appalachian workers that are in your local communities, you are, again, importing foreign workers, decimating those, those, those towns and creating kind of a captive workforce again. It's a serious problem.”

For Market to Market, I’m Peter Tubbs