Dekada’s ‘re-arrival’

These are my feelings about the Dekada group and its effort to “re-arrive” unto our community. The fact that a group such as this would emerge in our community speaks loudly about what we are as a society and who we are as a people. The Dekada group is a testament that people, any people, can not exist on $3.05 an hour—or $350 a month for housemaids and farmers—and false hopes for a permanent status.

Added to living on a wage that falls far short of a living wage comes the problem of the pretension of their not knowing their status. Now this is a fallacy because every nonresident worker comes to the Northern Mariana Islands knowing full well that one day they will leave—or should leave. Most, not all, nonresident workers arrive on the islands with the intent to do everything within their powers to remain only so long as their stay here is better than remaining in their country and true home. Plain and simple as that. No one comes here knowing that they will be a permanent part of this community or that laws will be enacted to provide them citizenship or permanent residency.

The Covenant gave to our government the authority to handle our own labor and immigration laws, intending for our government to limit the overrun of nonresidents in the NMI. However, local control of labor and immigration has been misused for the exact opposite purpose, to allow for an over saturation of nonresidents, to the detriment of residents.

Yet, this group organizes to carve themselves a place in a community that, if not for their willingness to work for cheap wages, would rather that the nonresident workers leave the islands and return home. The workers themselves, if they were offered jobs in their homeland that pay as much as what they make here, would choose to return home. I have known some people who chose to do just that.

Spin doctors in our business community argue that low wages makes things affordable, whether that is the price of gasoline, the cost of groceries or the price of an engine job at a service shop. However, since they get paid low wages, the workers have no incentive to work hard for the interest of their employer and for a larger profit for the business unless you run a sweatshop. A worker for a construction company would take his sweet time running an errand to the hardware store because the end result for him is the same whether he hurries back to work under the hot sun at the project site or take his sweet time driving to and from the hardware store.

A good example of efficient workmanship and profit was the construction and erection of two towers at the former agriculture station at As Perdido. One tower was built by nonresident workers and the other was installed by workers brought in from the United States. Guess what happened? The tower assigned to the U.S. workers, making U.S. wages and benefits, was completed way in advance of the other tower. They used machines to do things the other workers decided to do manually. And, despite the higher cost of the one tower’s construction, which included equipment rental and pay benefits ten-fold more than the nonresident workers, that tower project proved to be more profitable because it was completed and available to the radio station early.

You see, so long as we have low wages in our islands, our economy cannot improve. There is no money being spent to support a livelihood. The workers instead remit most of their pay and we lose the multiplier effects normally expected in a community where more than half of the total population is employed full-time. Rather than a robust economy, we instead have an economy that is stagnant since its engine depends on the buying power of people earning less than the poverty level in the median U.S. community.

The Dekada group, moreover, do not have a claim to either permanent residency or citizenship. There is no such a thing as a CNMI citizen and the CNMI Constitution prohibits the establishment of another class of residents. This may seem so obvious except that the so called stateless were never without a country in the first place. But we now know what happened.

What it all adds up to is that, so long as we continue to bring in nonresident workers and pay them $3.05 an hour, these individuals would be, and have actually been, a drain on our economy, rather than the often praised advantage that many people point to. Oh, don’t get me wrong. These workers are profitable to the factories and the construction companies, but they are not to our community as a whole. After all, how much can you tax someone making $3.05 an hour or $350 a month?

An interesting point was made by Mr. George Leung, Hong Kong Shanghai Bank’s Chief Economist, at a recent meeting of the Saipan Chamber of Commerce. He pointed out that in cheap-labor intensive industries, all countries are losing to China’s unlimited supply of cheap labor. Even countries like Malaysia, India, and Pakistan, which for years touted their cheap labor force, have lost more than 50 percent of business to China, and stand to lose much more than that in the years to come. Mr. Leung stated that the only countries that are thriving in the new global economy are not the ones that focus on cheap labor, but the ones that focus on skilled, high-end, value-adding labor. Such an argument flies in the face of the claims made by some businessmen that we need to continue to keep a cheap labor force. According to Mr. Leung, relying on cheap labor is exactly the wrong thing to do.

What we must immediately do is to identify those jobs that are absolutely necessary to our community and economy. We must make it a requirement to offer higher wages for those jobs we need so that productivity by workers would increase because the positions would be competitive. A worker that does not produce profits for a business would obviously no longer have a job because a business would lose money on that employer. That worker must be required to exit the Commonwealth. Notice that I said exit the NMI, and not transfer to another employer. I can not, for the life of me, understand why an employer would agree to hire an employee who is already troublesome and unproductive at their present job. Good employees are given incentives to remain at their jobs; they are not given reasons to leave the employer. So, I must say that for most employers, they reward and keep good employees, doing almost anything to ensure they do not file a labor related complaint and get transferred to another company unless the job is menial in the first place and nobody wants it anyways except those that would have to be brought in from outside the NMI. Then the vicious cycle begins, the NMI’s population increases, more money is remitted to points outside, and we get nothing but more drain on our infrastructure and, of course, the token tax paid, but computed on, $3.05 an hour or $350 a month. An advantage that nonresident workers have is that their employment is protected by employment contracts while U.S. citizens employed in the private sector are employed at will.

In any event, any nonresident worker who arrives in the NMI undoubtedly knows that he or she is here temporarily and the time will eventually come when they will have to return home. And, home, no matter the length of time of their stay here, is not the NMI.

For Dekada to now spin their “re-arrival,” hire a spokesperson, have a few politicians give them scraps of empty promises because Dekada children are soon to turn 18 and thus be eligible to vote is, whatever you call it, offering false hope to these peoples’ dream of making the NMI or the U.S. their permanent home. I, however, understand that many children of members of Dekada are U.S. citizens and could, once they turn 18, petition their parents for permanent residency and subsequently U.S. citizenship. Then, they would choose to move to the U.S. where they would earn more and could own homes and be true contributors to the economy.

In the meantime, as a compromise, sadly, these people continue to want to remain here, organize themselves as the Dekada group, earn below poverty line wages, place a heavy load on our already highly used infrastructures, and hope and pray that something will come their way so that they could be counted as permanent members of our community and not chattels of businesses that have no scruples.

Again, these are my views and are offered as a way for these people to see for themselves where they truly stand. It is never my intention to disparage Dekada’s hopes and aspirations. But it seems to me that they are being offered false hopes that lead nowhere. The fact that most of these people are classified as nonresident workers, says it all. Sad, yes, but also true. (Gregorio C. Sablan)