The Janitors' Closet

Properly checking work authorization status

CBN's system and its partnership with Homeland Ssecurity through the IMAGE program is featured in a recent article on Cleanlink, also picked up by Building Service Contractors Association International's e-newsletter.

CBN and Porter Industries, up in Colorado, are the only janitorial firms in the nation enrolled in the IMAGE program, providing sophisticated training to firms' personnel departments in confirming ID and properly dealing with related documentation.  Good summary, in the article, on document preperation and retention.  Over and above the IMAGE program, as part of our in-house security program, we confirm applicant ID by comparing drivers license photos with the State's file of them (we require a current Arizona driver's license of all applicants), and run a Social Security number based address check, to see who-all might be using the applicant-submitted SSN.  Pretty tight system, overall.

Self Check is now available nationwide

In a post several weeks ago, I recommended Immigration & Customs Enforcement's "Self Check" program, which allows folks to confirm that E-Verify will return an accurate result when a prospective employer sends in their information.  At that point, the program was in the "rolling out" stage, available only here and there across the nation.  ICE has since announced that the program in on-line nationwide.

We're big on proper employee documentation, and fully screen all of our folks.  E-Verify helps us to confirm identity of our people, which makes running an individual's court records, for instance, a bit more meaningful.  We go a step further, in fact, as a charter member of ICE's "IMAGE" Program.

The nationwide Self Check availability is quite useful.  I checked my own the other day; regardless of what you might have heard, I'm legal.

Self Check - USCIS

"Self Check" is a handy little service introduced recently by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.  It allows an individual to check his own name/Social Security number combination, before doing a job interview, and so head off "no match" issues before hand.  Besides the obvious ID theft issues, it's amazing how many records bounce because of clerical mistakes - misspelled names and so on.

Good idea for the prospective employer to provide the e-mail address of the service to folks they are looking at interviewing, again to speed up the process.

"USCIS is releasing the Self Check service in phases. At this point the service is offered only to users that maintain an address in Arizona, California, Colorado, the District of Colombia, Idaho, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, Nevada, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, South Carolina, Texas, Utah, Virginia, or Washington. The availability of Self Check will be limited for the initial launch as the service is tested and improved upon based on the outcomes of the initial implementation."

As a charter member of ICE's IMAGE program, we take pride in thoroughly screening our folks.  The Self Check program can only help.

General McCaffrey comments

Interesting remarks by General Barry McCaffrey, our onetime "drug czar", on the dangers of our dysfunctional immigration and border control policy.  Covers the economic impact of what I'd call "high end" and "low end" immigration, impact of our "war on drugs" and huge prison population on the growth of gang activity, Mexican drug cartels, and so on.  It's contained in a dispatch by Michael Yon, my favorite military correspondent.

McCaffrey's thoughts resonate with a number of points I've made here on various aspects of immigration policy, and with what I've argued elsewhere on our self-defeating (and hugely expensive) corrections system.

Enjoy!

How Much Does Immigration Boost Innovation?

Ran across an interesting study by the National Bureau of Economic Research on one effect of skilled immigrants.

"The 2003 National Survey of College Graduates shows that immigrants patent at double the native rate, and that this is entirely accounted for by their disproportionately holding degrees in science and engineering. These data imply that a one percentage point rise in the share of immigrant college graduates in the population increases patents per capita by 6%."

Fits with what I've suggested in  "Give Us Your Huddled Masses of Engineers".  Allowing in high performers benefit our society in many ways.  Given that I do janitorial service in Arizona, a border state, I focus a bit on the impact of our immigration policy (and lack there-of) on the lower end of the employment spectrum, but our policy on the higher end is at least as counter productive.

Benefits of raising the minimum wage

Bit of discussion on my Greater Phoenix Chamber of Commerce site; we're raising the minimum wage to $7.65 in 2012.

You'd think, in a time of high unemployment, we'd try to make lower skilled and entry level employees more affordable to employers, so more folks might be hired.  Even in times of high employment, whenever we raise the minimum wage, unemployment among youth, the unskilled, and some minorities spikes. 

We also do quite an effective job of keeping people unemployed by requiring state licensing (involving extensive training and fees) for one to enter a great many catagories of employment.  As just one example, in Arizona one has to pay for and complete some 400 classroom hours of training, pass exams and pay fees, to become a barber.  Multiply that by hundreds of occupations and professions, and by 50 states.  With high barriers to enter many occupations, high "structural" unemployment becomes understandable. 

On the other hand, a higher legal minimum wage, and tighter legal restrictions on who can hold jobs, do make illegal employment much more attractive, to both employer and employee (particlularly in fields like janitorial, and in border states like Arizona...).  This should help job creation among those undocumented immigrants whom we've recently decided not to deport.  Always a silver lining.

Steve Jobs's advice for Obama

Great Gordon Crovitz editorial in this morning's Wall Street Journal.

" 'You're headed for a one-term presidency, Steve Jobs told President Obama at the beginning of a one-on-one session the president requested earlier this year.  As described in the authorized biography by Walter Isaacson, Apple's founder said regulations had created too many burdens on the economy."

"Jobs told Mr. Obama that Apple employs 700,000 factory workers in China because it can't find the 30,000 engineers in the U. S. that it needs on-site at its plants."

Jobs "stressed the need for more trained engineers and suggested that any foreign students who earned an engineering degree in the U. S. should be given a visa to stay in the country..."  Folks from MItt Romney to New York Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer to Arizona's Jeff Flake agree.  Congressman Flake has proposed the "Staple Act", to "staple" a work visa to any such diploma.

70% of doctorates in electrical engineering awarded in America, for instance, go to foreigners - most of whom we deport when they graduate.  Quite a gift to the economies of India and China.  You'd think those most productive folks - scientists, mathematicians, engineers - we'd want to keep here, to grow our economy, create jobs, even buy houses.  It's not rocket science.  Even folks in businesses like janitorial service, dealing with another range of immigration issues, can figure that out.

Immigration and Custom Enforcement's IMAGE program

A couple of weeks ago, Homeland Security's Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) did a promotional and training program for the Phoenix area on their signature "IMAGE" program.  IMAGE is a public/private partnership in which employers upgrade their screening systems beyond a simple 'send the name and SSN to E-Verify', and ICE provides the employer quite advanced training in document preparation and, most significantly, ID verification, which is central to our applicant screening program.  Kind of pointless, we figure, to run a background check on an individual without first establishing his identity. 

We at CBN joined the program right after its 'prototype' stage, and are not only a charter member but are still one of only two janitorial firms in the nation that's joined the partnership.  We find it a great benefit in both the practical aspects of insuring a legitimate workforce, and in guaranteeing the same to our clients.

You would think, in a state as focused on illegal immigration as Arizona, and in an industry like janitorial with a reputation for corner cutting in employment issues, that more local firms in my industry would use programs like IMAGE to tighten up their operations and improve their - well - image.  But, in the rather large crowd the other day, I don't believe I saw any other janitorial providers.  Go figure.

Health and Indoor Air Quality

I had a nice article on the health benefits of proper vacuuming procedure in the on-line edition of  
Contracting Profits.

I stressed HEPA filtration, microfiber wipes instead of feather dusters, vacuuming rather dust-mopping hard floors, microfiber damp mops - and their collective effect on indoor air quality, and the keeping allergens and other harmful particles out of the air we breath.

But heck - read the article.

Immigration Audits Drive Illegal Workers Underground

Quite an informative article in Monday's Wall Street Journal, front page: "Immigration Audits Drive Illegal Workers Underground".

Seems an Immigration audit caught the Minneapolis office of ABM, a very major player in the janitorial industry.  All undocumented employees were forced out of work, including a Mexican couple (supporting two toddlers) making nearly double minimum wage plus benefits, having been employed by ABM for over ten years.  I'd guess they'd slipped through back when record keeping requirements seemed a bit less stringent - not to mention firms' lesser ability, back then. to detect false ID.

The couple then went to work for a smaller firm, but were caught again, and are now struggling, using part time work and food bank donations.  Many folks in similar circumstances work "off the books", not paying employment taxes or receiving any workplace protections, such as minimum wage and overtime requirements, OSHA regulation enforcement, or workers comp insurance.

The audit program, featuring penalties for the firms, but no penalties or deportation for the workers, is a replacement, by the current administration, of the "deportation" raids of earlier years.

Seems to me that if we do not want the undocumented here, we ought deport them.  If we don't deport them, it makes no sense at all to deprive them of their employment.  Wouldn't it be better for all concerned to keep them productively employed, paying taxes, rather than either working "off the books", or on the dole?  At CBN, we're quite careful to check ID and to fully background applicants; doesn't mean I'm happy having to turn down an entire class of, generally, honest and willing workers.  Particularly since many of them work for my competitors, "off the books", with all the problems that implies.

Further, any folks who can keep jobs, in the unstable janitorial industry, for ten years plus, and do well enough to get promotions and substantial pay increases, seem to me to be the kind of folks we need to keep here in America - in the system.  Particularly a couple with two kids who, being born here, are U.S. citizens.

Quite a comprehensive article; a tale of lost jobs, home foreclosures, college plans destroyed - lives derailed.