US Department of Labor is charged with protecting the labor market and investigation and enforcement activities related to that.
On July 8, 2013, the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) approved OFLC's revised retention schedule following a 30-day period of public notice and review.
As a result of the unique perishable nature of agricultural commodities in the H-2A program, OFLC will temporarily (for a period not to exceed 30 days) implement the following mailing procedure:
USDOL had denied a series of cases for many employers represented by various law firms. The ground of denial was that when "engineering" was one of the acceptable majors for an IT job, that created too much ambiguity for a case to be approved. DOL stated that there are fields of engineering, such as Agricultural Engineering, which are clearly inapplicable to IT positions.
This ruling had become a nation wide issue.
On August 30, 2013, the Department of Labor (Department) will publish in the Federal Register a final rule to delay indefinitely the effective date of the Wage Methodology for the Temporary Non-Agricultural Employment H-2B Program final rule (2011 Wage Rule), which was published on January 19, 2011, 76 FR 3452.
The Department has published a Notice in the Federal Register announcing a 60-day comment period on its proposed changes to the form ETA-9033, Attestation by Employers Using Alien Crewmembers for Longshore Activities in U.S. Ports and ETA-9033A, Attestation by Employers Using Alien Crewmembers for Longshore Activities in the State of Alaska. To read the Notice, please click here.
The Office of Foreign Labor Certification has posted updated program factsheets containing the Quarter 3 FY 2013 selected statistics for the Permanent Labor Certification Program,
Currently, the LCR displays all certified H-1B1 and E-3 Labor Condition Applications (LCA) and Permanent labor certifications, dating back to April 15, 2009. However, the Department is experiencing technical difficulties with the display of approved H-1B LCAs. In addition, due to the historical paper-based filings of H-2A and H-2B applications, these labor certification documents must be manually redacted and uploaded to the LCR and, therefore, only a limited number of records covering Fiscal Year 2013 are currently available.
A revised version of the ETA Form 9141 will be implemented in the iCERT Portal on June 18. The form changes were pursued through the Paperwork Reduction Act process and have been reviewed and approved by the Office of Management and Budget. Minor changes were made to clarify information needed for more efficient application processing. A fillable copy of the form is available here.
The Department of Labor is making available Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) to assist filers with complying with the requirements of the joint Interim Final Rule. The FAQs address the applicability of the new prevailing wage methodology, employer wage obligations, requests for review and the processing of pending H-2B prevailing wage requests and H-2B applications for temporary labor certification.
To learn more, please read the FAQs.