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Tenorio pushes for Ten Year Transitional Period
(Washington, DC) August 22, 2008. In a letter to Elaine Chao, Secretary of
the U.S. Department of Labor, CNMI Resident Representative Pedro A. Tenorio
requested that the five-year Transition Period mandated in Public Law 110-229 be
extended to ten years.
“Replacing foreign workers with U.S. citizens or citizens of the Freely
Associated States is a process that requires education, training and skill
development so that these workers can qualify for many of the existing jobs.
It also requires time, as many of these potential new local employees are either
too young to join the workforce or they are not trained in any trade or
vocational and technical disciplines,” pointed out Tenorio in his letter.
“The main reason that the number of foreign workers has declined in the last
several years is because of the closure of the majority of CNMI’s garment
factories and numerous other businesses. It is not because they have been
overwhelmingly replaced by ‘local’ workers. The CNMI must be able to
attract new businesses and those new businesses will want some assurance that
there is a stable workforce,” continued Tenorio.
Although the newly established law allows for an extension after five years,
Tenorio believes one will be necessary and there is no reason to delay its
implementation. “Public Law 110-229 requires that by December 31, 2014, or
the end of the Transition Period, the number of permits to hire transitional
workers be reduced to zero. In all honesty, I do not see how the number of
trained local workers will be nearly sufficient to fill existing jobs let alone
any new jobs that I hope are created by new business investors in the CNMI in
the near future,” added Tenorio.
A ten-year transition period “will provide at least some breathing room for
potential business investors to invest with confidence that they will have the
needed manpower to operate their businesses, and allow time to truly begin
training a local workforce to take over these jobs in the future. Time and
the level of new investments will tell if we may need additional extensions
beyond this, but I am certain, as I believe most employers are, that this first
extension will be necessary,” concluded Tenorio.
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