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Senate OKs extension of alien
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Posted on Aug 10 2005
The Senate passed a bill yesterday that aims to extend for two years the employment of nonresident workers at the Department of Public Health and a one-year extension for both the Department of Public Works and Commonwealth Utilities Corp.
The Senate passed House Bill 14-344 during its session yesterday on Tinian.
The bill originally covered only the DPH but during the session, the senators voted to include DPW and CUC.
The Senate approval only meant an extension of two years for DPH, instead of 10 years as requested by the department. Also, the Senate did not agree to the DPH’s request for a two-year contract for each worker.
“We didn’t vote for a two-year contract. We kept the existing yearly contract for all,” said Sen. Joseph Mendiola yesterday.
Earlier, DPH said that the 2005 sunset provision in hiring foreign workers is “unrealistic” and the one-year restriction on employment contract “unreasonable.”
In a position paper submitted to the Legislature, DPH Secretary James U. Hofschneider said that despite the CNMI’s best effort to recruit local residents, the department continues to need health care professionals from overseas.
He said the education and development of sufficient local health care workers “must be viewed as a long-term program that will not be able to fill the Commonwealth’s increasing needs within the near future, despite the department’s best efforts.”
Further, Hofschneider said that the existing one-year limitation on employment contracts of nonresident workers “has proven to be unreasonable and financially expensive to the department.”
The intent of the law, which is to increase the chances for resident workers to replace nonresidents at contract completion, “has no impact on DPH positions.”
He said that positions are continuously recruited for local residents but “in most cases there are no local health care professionals available.”
As a result of the one-year restriction, he said that guest workers often leave after the contract, requiring the government to provide tickets and shipment for repatriation, as well for the new workers coming in.
The DPW had also requested the Legislature to further extend its hiring of nonresident workers, mostly engineers.
