Tuesday, July 07, 2015

Created jobs Boustanying out all over

If when David Vitter becomes Governor next year, we're gonna have to go and make ourselves a new US Senator.  The speculative field in that inevitable election has not yet emerged, but Charles Boustany bravely volunteers for consideration.  
Rep. Charles Boustany told supporters at a June fundraiser that he plans to run for the Senate in 2016 if Sen. David Vitter's 2015 gubernatorial run is successful, a donor told National Journal, and Boustany has hired an experienced Senate campaign manager to helm his political operation.
Boustany showed up in your Times-Picayune/NOLA.com/Freak Lobster Feed last weekend with an op-ed about how he was authoring a piece of legislation to help Louisiana "job creators."  It is called the "Seasonal Labor for Job Creators Act."
Today, there is a statutory cap on the number of visas issued per fiscal year – 33,000 from October to March, and 33,000 from April to September. As the economy slowly improves, the need for these visas is increasing and surpassing the number available. Unfortunately, between onerous new rules promulgated jointly by Homeland Security and the Department of Labor and what appears to be manipulation of the process employers must complete to attract these workers, the program is in chaos. This year, the cap was opened for applications on April 1, and all 33,000 visas were spoken for within a few days.  Amazingly, my friend Frank told me that he's resorted to bailing prisoners out of jail to do the backbreaking work of processing Louisiana seafood.
Boustany says there aren't enough temporary work visas available for his friend Frank to exploit in supplying the slave labor he needs to keep his seafood processing plant running.
For most people in Louisiana, cracking the shell off a crawfish, sucking the head, and swallowing the tail meat is a joyous part of what it means to call this place home. But peeling crawfish is not so fun for guestworkers from Mexico, who allege that they are facing slave-like conditions in a Louisiana plant. Eight striking guestworkers, who say they are sometimes forced to peel and boil crawfish for up to 24 hours straight without overtime pay, outlined the alleged abuses in a rally outside of a Sam’s Club in Metairie on Wednesday, June 6th. That same day, they filed complaints with the Department of Labor and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission against their employer, C.J.’s Seafood of Breaux Bridge, La., on behalf of the forty guest workers employed there. C.J.’s Seafood sells an estimated 85% of its crawfish to Walmart, the largest retailer in the United States, and owner of Sam's Club.
Why won't those "bureaucrats in Washington" let Boustany's friend Frank create more of these kinds of jobs? One just can't imagine.  Frank even had to go down to the pound and pick up some prisoners to get the work done once or twice. Lucky for Frank, there's plenty of those to go around in Louisiana.

Goes to show if we don't let our job creators have their "Slavery By Another Name" one way they'll go out and get it somewhere else.  The free market really is terrific like that.  In any case, Boustany is hoping Frank will help create a job for him in the Senate next year. He probably will. Maybe Governor Vitter can drop him a reference. This stuff seems pretty important to him too.

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