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As the Chicago hotel and restaurant scene booms, so, too, does the scramble for workers, and some businesses say they need more immigration, not less, to meet their labor needs.

Those were among the sentiments captured in a new report from the Chicago Council on Global Affairs that analyzed the hospitality industry's reliance on immigrant labor across the Midwest, which comes as the Trump administration moves to reduce immigration.

With hospitality job growth expected to continue and the region's U.S.-born population graying, shrinking and opting for higher-skill jobs, the report says the sector needs access to an immigrant workforce to keep the doors open.

Leisure and hospitality jobs, which account for nearly 10 percent of employment in Illinois and across the Midwest, are disproportionately filled by immigrants, who not only wash dishes and clean hotel rooms but also launch small businesses that create more jobs, according to the report, released Thursday and the last in a series.

Immigrants, who make up 13 percent of the U.S. population, account for 31 percent of hotel workers and 22 percent of food service workers, according to the report. Immigrant entrepreneurs comprise 43 percent of owners of small hotels and motels and 37 percent of small restaurant owners.

But about 1.3 million hospitality workers across the country work without legal authorization. Twenty percent of the nation's cooks and 28 percent of its dishwashers are here illegally, the report says.

Report author Sara McElmurry, assistant director of immigration at the think tank, spent two years interviewing several dozen restaurant and hotel owners and managers, labor organizers and trade associations across the Midwest to understand the industry's labor concerns in the region.

The consensus is that "we need reforms that responsibly expand the immigration system to hire more of these workers," McElmurry said. In addition, she said, "what I heard consistently was let's build some sort of pathway that allows workers to adjust their legal status."

The White House and some Republican lawmakers have taken the opposite stance, saying immigration, particularly for low-skill jobs, hurts American workers who must compete.

President Donald Trump, whose toughened immigration enforcement policies have raised fears among some hospitality businesses that they could be subject to workplace raids, this month endorsed proposed legislation that would reduce legal immigration by 50 percent by giving priority to highly skilled, educated and English-speaking immigrants, and deprioritizing extended family members of current legal residents. It did not address what to do with immigrants already in the country who are here illegally.

But some of the toughest jobs to fill are low-wage, low-skill hospitality jobs, according to the council's report, especially in areas like Chicago with an exploding food scene.

"In Chicago it is so competitive, there are so many restaurants, it is difficult to get staff and good staff," said Billy Lawless Sr., whose family owns the Gage, the Dawson and several other popular restaurants in the city.

Lawless, himself an immigrant from Ireland and an advocate of immigration reform, said it has always been difficult to find dishwashers and table bussers, but now the labor crunch is across the board.

"Of course we'd like to employ citizens, absolutely, why wouldn't we," said Lawless, who estimates at least 30 percent of his staff are immigrants, most of whom earn more than minimum wage. "They just won't apply to the menial jobs."

But Dave Gorak, executive director of the Midwest Coalition to Reduce Immigration, said the notion Americans won't do the work is a "falsehood" because many already do.

"The availability of cheap foreign labor, especially the illegal variety, is preferred because employers know it serves to hold down labor costs," said Gorak, whose group is based in La Valle, Wis. "Without this plentiful source of workers, these employers would be forced to make a greater effort to recruit Americans and raise wages."

To be sure, there are areas of Chicago with high rates of unemployment and the city talks often about a crisis of youth joblessness that plagues parts of the South and West sides.

But while there are pipeline programs to help employ people with barriers, such as criminal records or bouts with homelessness, report author McElmurry said they have found "varying rates of success."

"A lot of employers have told me the most consistent source of workers has been immigrant labor," she said.

Immigration is particularly important to the Midwest, where the population is not only aging into retirement but also growing more slowly than the rest of the nation and losing people of prime working age, McElmurry said.

The industry also has felt squeezed as teens and young adults who used to take entry-level hospitality jobs prioritize other activities, like internships or summer school, and gravitate toward jobs that give them benefits and holidays off, her report said.

Teens made up 17.4 percent of the restaurant workforce in 2016, up from 16 percent in 2010 but still down from 21 percent in 2007, according to the National Restaurant Association.

Low pay and physically demanding work also make it difficult to fill certain jobs with U.S.-born workers who have other options. In the Chicago metro area, the mean wage for housekeepers is $12.81 an hour, or $26,650 a year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. For dishwashers, the mean wage in the area is $10.88, or $22,620 a year.

Mario Garcia, who until last year worked as a weekend manager at a suburban Best Western, said nearly all of the workers he hired at the hotel were immigrants because they accepted low pay for difficult jobs without complaint. Most earned minimum wage, which in Illinois currently is $8.25 an hour.

Americans who applied usually were hired to work the front desk, where their language skills were most useful. They didn't want the physically punishing jobs like housekeeping once they learned the wage, he said.

Hiring immigrants became "a cycle," he said, because it was easier for the Spanish-speaking supervisors to train new workers in their language. Sometimes it was positive, because they could communicate with international guests. But the language barrier also prevented some workers from advocating for themselves, such as when years went by without a raise, he said.

While critical to the industry, immigrant workers are vulnerable to exploitation, Garcia said. They work hard without complaint for fear of a reduction in their hours or of being replaced by another willing applicant.

Garcia said he didn't think the hotel wanted to make wages more appealing because it counted on saving money on its workforce so it could invest in hotel renovations.

McElmurry said the industry needs to take a holistic approach to its labor challenges and address low wages, demanding or unsafe working conditions and high worker turnover in addition to immigration reform.

The report offers several policy recommendations to benefit workers and employers, including streamlining the tangle of worker visas that allow people to work in the U.S. seasonally or temporarily if they are transferred from abroad or are in training.

Other recommendations include providing a pathway for immigrants in the U.S. illegally to become legal and, subsequently, a mandatory system for employers to verify the legal status of their new hires.

The report also recommends Congress create a permanent visa channel for foreign-born entrepreneurs, who drive many dining innovations.

Despite the federal gridlock over immigration, Illinois and Chicago were highlighted for creating environments where immigrants can flourish.

In Chicago, the $30 million Hatchery incubator for food and beverage entrepreneurs is being built in collaboration in part with Accion Chicago, which serves immigrants. The city also partnered with area universities to launch a Global Entrepreneurship in Residence Program to sponsor entrepreneurs with H-1B visas, and it is creating municipal identification cards for people living here illegally.

Illinois, meanwhile, is the only state in the Midwest that extends driving privileges to immigrants in the U.S. illegally, helping them get to work. And Gov. Bruce Rauner has said he plans to sign the Trust Act, which would prohibit state and local police from arresting or detaining people solely because of their immigration status.

Sam Toia, president and CEO of the Illinois Restaurant Association, said in an emailed statement that the report "definitely drives the conversation forward with pragmatic immigration reform policy recommendations that will help the Midwest's hospitality industries thrive."

aelejalderuiz@chicagotribune.com

Twitter @alexiaer

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Hospitality industry needs more immigrant workers to survive, report says - Chicago Tribune

From Alabama poultry plants to Utah hotels, employers who want to hire unauthorized workers or to escape accountability for their poor treatment of legal workers appear to be turning to temp agencies and other labor contractors to evade scrutiny.

The practice is especially prevalent in Western and Southern states that require private employers to use E-Verify, a federal online service, to confirm that their employees are legal residents.

In eight of the nine states that require E-Verify for private employers (Alabama, Arizona, Georgia, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee and Utah), the number of temporary workers grew faster than the national average between 2012 and 2016, according to a Stateline analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics data. The one exception was Louisiana.

"It is not a coincidence that the significant rise in temporary workers happened around the time when a number of states were enacting laws which mandated use of E-Verify," said Muzaffar Chishti, an immigration law expert at the Migration Policy Institute, a nonprofit research group.

"It became difficult for companies to comply because people did not have work authorization," Chishti said. "They quickly realized that the law applies to hiring people, but they can't accuse you if you're not literally hiring people. They could get agencies to hire for them or use workers as contractors without hiring them."

The practice has drawn concern both from conservative experts who want less illegal immigration, and from immigration advocates who find temp agencies harder to hold accountable for worker abuse.

Ira Mehlman of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which favors immigration restrictions, said "business wants to take advantage of this loophole," and that state and federal officials lack the political will to close it.

On the other side of the political spectrum, Naomi Tsu of the Southern Poverty Law Center, which has studied the abuse of Hispanic employees at Alabama poultry plants, said the use of labor contractors to evade E-Verify "is a double-edged sword. (Immigrants) can get jobs, but it does open them up to abuse."

The Southern Poverty Law Center, or SPLC, has filed complaints about laborers hired by a contractor for the Wayne Farms and Pilgrim's Pride poultry plants in Alabama. The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission followed up with a lawsuit against the contractor, East Coast Labor Solutions.

Both the SPLC and the federal commission accused East Coast Labor Solutions, which has had a series of different names, of singling out Hispanic workers both noncitizens in the country illegally and U.S. citizens recruited from Puerto Rico for harder work, lower pay and more dangerous conditions on segregated lines.

"Plant workers, many of whom are immigrants, are often treated as disposable resources by their employers," a 2013 SPLC report found. "Threats of deportation and firing are frequently used to keep them silent."

The federal government had already taken action against Pilgrim's Pride. The company paid a $4.5 million settlement in 2009 after federal authorities arrested 338 illegal immigrants during raids on plants in five states.

In 1986, the federal Immigration Reform and Control Act made it illegal to knowingly hire unauthorized workers. Employers have sought ways around the law ever since, according to Chishti.

In states that don't mandate E-Verify screening, employers may hire workers with falsified paperwork and still comply with federal law, since they are not knowingly violating it. Furthermore, E-Verify cannot be used to screen existing employees only new hires.

"Obviously if the working unauthorized population is near 7 million, something is going on," Chishti said. "How are people able to find work if the law says you can't hire them?"

Even in states that mandate the use of E-Verify, the threat of state legal action has been mostly theoretical. A spokesman for Alabama's attorney general said the office is charged with enforcing the law but hasn't actively done so. In Georgia, the Department of Audits requires that companies prove they are using E-Verify by providing a registration number, but the agency doesn't have the resources to check up on individual hires.

"A lot of politicians want to pass laws to make themselves look good but they don't fund the enforcement," said David Fowler, president of the E-Verify Employer Agent Alliance, a trade group of computer programmers working to build tools to help employers use E-Verify.

Still, because of occasional federal audits and investigations of whistleblower complaints, it's risky for a company to hire unauthorized immigrants indirectly through contractors, Fowler said. He pointed to a 2005 case in which Wal-Mart paid $11 million to settle accusations that it used cleaning contractors that hired unauthorized immigrants.

More recently, in 2014 U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement uncovered suspicious hiring at a Salt Lake City-based hotel chain. Grand America Hotels and Resorts paid nearly $2 million to settle accusations that managers and employees created temporary employment agencies to rehire unauthorized immigrants who had been fired after an earlier audit.

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More employers may be using temps to skirt immigration laws - Post-Bulletin

August 24 at 6:24 PM

Regarding the Aug. 23 Metro article Crisis vaults McAuliffe into spotlight:

It is outrageous for Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe (D) to assert that the American Civil Liberties Union of Virginia bears some responsibility for the violence in Charlottesville. The citys decision to revoke the permit for Jason Kessler to hold a rally in Emancipation Park was a prior restraint on free speech. The Supreme Court said prior restraint is the most serious and the least tolerable infringement on First Amendment rights.

Prior restraint can be justified only if government places reasonable limitations on the time, place and manner of the speech. It was the citys burden to show that revoking the permit for Emancipation Park and granting a permit for McIntire Park met these standards. The federal court said the city failed to do so.

The ACLU finds Mr. Kesslers views loathsome. To suggest that Mr. Kesslers speech was not entitled to First Amendment protection would eviscerate the First Amendment. As Supreme Court Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. reaffirmed: The idea that the government may restrict speech expressing ideas that offend ... strikes at the heart of the First Amendment. Speech that demeans on the basis of race, ethnicity, gender, religion, age, disability, or any other similar ground is hateful; but the proudest boast of our free speech jurisprudence is that we protect the freedom to express the thought that we hate.

David A. Drachsler, Alexandria

The writer is a member of the Litigation Screening Committee of the American Civil Liberties Union of Virginia.

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The ACLU was practicing a core First Amendment duty - Washington Post

In this day in age, if an employee has something to say, they should be able to say it, right? Not exactly. One Google employee recently learned the hard way when he was fired after writing and circulating a memo where he criticized the companys diversity efforts.

When the memo went public on August 5th, women and under-represented groups in tech criticized it andGoogle denounced it. But, after Google fired the engineer claiming hed violated the companys code of conduct, things changed. Some people appalled that someone could lose his job for expressing dissent, while some took to Twitter discussing the topic of free speech.

However, the First Amendment only protects the publics right to free speech from government censorship, and not corporate censorship. One of the reasons that a private employer can censor speech is because the First Amendment does not cover private entities as it is limited only to government federal, state and local.

Veronica Nannis, a partner with Joseph Greenwald & Laake focusing on qui tam litigation and whistleblower rights, sat down with IPWatchdog to discuss the question controversial topic of free speech in the workplace.

Private employers are typically allowed to censor speech that occurs on the job. The First Amendment does not cover them, she explained. They are also allowed to censor speech or activity that discriminates against, creates a hostile work environment or harasses another employee. In that regard, and as with all our rights, our right to free speech generally ends where another persons rights begin.

An employees off-the-clock, private, political or religious activities are protected by both federal and state discrimination laws, but once political speech enters the work place, a private employer may legally discipline or fire an employee for such proselytizing in many cases, per Nannis. The gray areas in between are times when you need to seek consultation with an employment attorney in your state.

As it related to the Google incident, it was first reported that a memo authored by a Google employee, titledGoogles Ideological Echo Chamber, was being circulated among Google employees. Later that day, the memo was obtained by the media and made public. The memos author was identified in the press as a senior employee named James Damore. In the memo, Damore criticized the efforts of tech companies, Google included, to employ programs and hiring practices concentrating on diversity. Specifically, Damore was critical of tech company initiatives which had the goal of recruiting and employing female engineers.

The crux of Damores critique was that the reason for the low number of women in the tech industry was not something that could be countered by policies promoting diversity through recruitment, education, or anti-discrimination measures, explained Nannis. Rather the reason there are so few women in the tech field is due to biological differences, including higher agreeableness and more neuroticism, that leave women less well-equipped to perform the work that tech jobs demand.

The media coverage sparked debate, some outrage, and a focus on Googles culture, among other things. After days of the media firestorm, Google had terminated Damores employment. Googles CEO, Sundar Pichai, stated, in an email published by the Washington Post, that although Google strongly supported the rights of its employees to express themselves and debate issues like those discussed in Damores memo, To suggest a group of our colleagues have traits that make them less biologically suited to that work is offensive and not OK. It is contrary to our basic values and our Code of Conduct. Pichai reiterated that point by stating that portions of the memo violate our Code of Conduct and cross the line by advancing harmful gender stereotypes in our workplace. For his part, Damore stated, as reported in the Financial Times, that he is currently exploring all possible legal remedies. Damore also stated that prior to his employment being terminated, he had filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board and that its illegal to retaliate against a NLRB charge.

According to Nannis, while whistleblowers are protected under various state and federal laws and retaliation laws can protect employees who file complaints or grievances, Google explained that the company could not have retaliated against Damore, because it was unaware of his NLRB complaint until news of the same was reported in the media after his dismissal.

Anti-retaliation laws generally require the employer to have known about the complaint and to have fired the employee, at least in part, due to it, she said.

So, how can employees protect themselves from incidents like Googles in the future?

Know your rights, be sensitive to others rights and know your employers rights too. Many states, including Maryland where I practice and California where Google is located, are at-will employment states, she explained. An at-will state means that, absent a contract, certain union protection, legal prohibition or public policy, an employer can demote or fire an employee for any reason,or no reason at all. If you live in an at-will state, your private employer does not need a reason to fire you. So, while an employee can speak at will, a private employer can fire at will as well.

In addition, Nannis advises to look to see if there are any state laws protecting private employer censorship of speech for non-work related activities. California is one of a handful of states, including Colorado, New York and North Dakota, where there are laws protecting limited out-of-work speech.

She added, If the Google employee had given an off-the-clock speech about his political views as may relate to IT and he had not mentioned Google by name, he would have had a stronger defense under California law, and Google might have had a harder time firing him for out-of-work activities. However, without the protection of one of these exceptions, an employee in an at-will state risks firing when he or she speaks out in a way that displeases their private employer.

Amanda G. Ciccatelli is a Freelance Journalist for IPWatchdog, where she covers intellectual property. She earned a B.A. in Communications and Journalism from Central Connecticut State University in 2010. Amanda is also currently the Lead Strategist of Content Marketing, Social Media & Digital Products at Informa, a leading global business intelligence, academic publishing, knowledge and events business. She also works as a Freelance Journalist for Inside Counsel. Amanda was formerly a Web Editor at Technology Marketing Corporation. Follow her at @AmandaCicc.

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Are Corporate Employees Protected by the First Amendment? - IPWatchdog.com

Recently in Charlottesville, Va., the 'Southern strategy' veil was lifted again. White supremacy born out of hatred, bigotry and profound ignorance resulted in chaos, violence and death again!

Fundamentalists like the Huckabee crowd, Robertson's, Falwell's, Bannon's and maybe some of you will offer the usual rationalizations, moral equivalencies and justifications. The fundamentalist right have hijacked the First Amendment to preach their filth of hate and bigotry.

The most dominant flag at this sickening display in Charlottesville was the Confederate flag. The Star Spangled Banner, our beautiful symbol, is flown around the world as a beacon of freedom, hope and decency; something not one of these terrorists would understand, including President Trump. No matter what Trump says he cannot explain away being intellectually and morally destitute.

Please proceed, Special Counsel Bob Mueller. You sir, are a Vietnam combat decorated Marine. You have had your skin in the game, fighting for flag and country. Leave no stone unturned and no one left behind. Justice and decency must prevail!

Jenson lives in Detroit Lakes, Minn.

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Letter: The right has hijacked the First Amendment to preach hate ... - INFORUM