U. hurt by foreigner labor salary policy

A recent policy change in the United States Labor Department is requiring universities to pay its foreign employees a salary that is now the same as what workers for private industry are earning. This has a direct effect on the University, which employs "a couple hundred people on H-1B Visas," the group of foreigners specified in this new policy, according to Associate Director of International Programs Ann Kuhlman. H-1B is a method that allows foreign professionals to work legally in the country while they attempt to find permanent residency. Kuhlman said most of these workers are employed at the University in impeaching and research capacities. Part of the process of getting an H-1B application is having to attest that your employer is paying the prevailing wage for that occupation, she said. Kuhlman added that there are several ways to calculate the prevailing wage, but that "the surest way to do it is to ask the department of labor what the prevailing wage is for a particular occupation, which is what we do." But a recent ruling eliminated the distinction between types of employers, which means all foreigner researchers must be paid at the same rate, whether they are working for an industry or a university. "The problem is that academic researchers are not paid what industrial researchers are paid," Kuhlman said, adding that these are two very different job markets. Assistant Vice President of Policy Planning David Morse said there are a number of ironies that make the rule "kind of crazy." He explained that the salary for a worker doing research in industry could be twice as much as the salary of a postdoctoral fellow who is doing research for a University. "So you'd end up paying a foreign postdoctoral fellow not only more than a US postdoctoral fellow, but you would also end up paying the postdoctoral fellow who is not a professor more than an assistant professor, more than an associate professor, and in most cases more than a full professor as well," Morse said. He added that the case the government is basing the prevailing wage on has nothing to do with either research or universities, but that it actually had to do domestic child care. "The Labor Department appears to be extrapolating from that and telling the regional administrators that they have to apply these rules to everyone in terms of making distinctions between US and non-US nationals," he said. Morse said the University has had several conversations with the Labor Department, both separately and in conjunction with other major universities and organizations. "The Labor Department has asked us to come up with a set of functions that distinguish between industry-based and university-based research people, namely postdoctorate fellows," he said. Morse said some of these distinctions include the fact that postdoctorate fellows do not teach, they need greater supervision and that "these are still relatively junior people." He added that the University is currently attempting to work out a system with which it can demonstrate these distinctions. "It is unreasonable and will cause enormous hardship," Morse said. "And it would have a terribly skewed effect in terms of salaries of comparable postdoctorate fellows from the US doing the same work and faculty members as well."

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