HANMI: ‘We did our best’

Although the CNMI was able to drum up support in its campaign against federal takeover during the recent U.S. Congressional hearing in Washington, Hotel Association of Northern Mariana Islands president Ron Sablan said it is still too early to declare victory.

“However, I do believe we did our best and we told our side of the story in a convincing way,” he said.

According to Sablan, the CNMI government and the business community presented a united stand built on solid facts to back up all the arguments against the federalization of local labor and immigration.

“This came as a great deal of confidence and I believe it made a favorable impression not only in the hearing but also in the private meetings that we had during the week,” he said.

In his testimony before the U.S. House Committee on Resources, Sablan said members of the tourism industry have worked hard to train and recruit local workers but there are still not enough local citizens to fulfill all the jobs.

The hotel association represents 67 percent of the total 4,588 rooms in the Northern Marianas. Highly dependent on the economies of Japan and Korea, members of the hotel association employ 2,118 people or roughly 3 percent of the total CNMI population.

“I believe that your good intentions are to clean up the sensationalized labor and immigration problems of the past, but a takeover is not an end-all solution. Our problems are proportionally nothing more than what occurs in cities across America,” he said.

Instead of an outright takeover, Sablan recommended that a supportive working relationship between the federal and local agencies must be built. He said real solutions can only be accomplished through a cooperative and focused approach.

Since Asia’s economic crisis begun in July 1997, the Northern Marianas tourism economy has dropped by more than 30 percent causing many hotels, particularly small, family-run operations, to barely survive.

A severe recession, Sablan said, is the worst possible time to raise wages and force the replacement of the hotel industry’s 61 percent workforce. Due to the economic crisis, hotels reduced by 15 percent its personnel.

“By increasing the minimum wage, business owners will be forced to make tough choices: more layoffs, increase prices, decrease working hours or throw in the towel,” Sablan said.

Sablan said it would be very unfair to compare Guam to Saipan because it is already a major transportation, shipping and communications hub in the region. With the exception of wages, he added that the cost of operating a hotel is more expensive on Saipan than on Guam due to the much smaller economies of scale, shipping costs
and infrastructure requirements.