Employer obligations in Sen. Specter’s guest worker bill

Thanks to Tony Herrera for giving us the URL of Sen. Specter’s bill, which as posted is unnamed and unnumbered. The meat of employer obligations is in Title IV, Section 403, “Employer obligations”, starting on page 204. Without having carefully compared the language with that of Sen. McCain’s bill, I surmise that the employer’s obligations and penalties in some respects seem either identical or similar. For instance 204 (b)(3) states that “All workers in this H2C category will be provided the working conditions and benefits that are normal to workers similarly employed in the area of intended employment.” The employer must provide workers comp insurance, regardless of what is normally done.
Sen. Sepecter’s bill does not have the foreign labor contractor provisions of Sen. McCain’s S.1033. Instead, the employer appears free to hire directly or through contractors, but bears per Title III all the legal liability of employer failures to comply. The bill expects to roll out the program throughout the entire economy starting with employers with workforces of at least 5,000. I cannot yet find a prohibition of independent contractor status, which is a remarkable feature of the McCain bill as I pointed out in an earlier posting.