Certificates important
in permit applications
~ Boasman tells of misconceptions ~
PHILIPSBURG--The Labour Department has started paying stricter attention to ensuring that expatriate workers have the qualifications required for the jobs for which employment permits are being requested.
This has become necessary because employers don’t always submit all the required documents when applying for employment permits for expatriate workers, and seldom provide them when asked.
Head of the Island Labour Department Rafael Boasman said that while many employers stressed the qualifications persons in the local market should possess when responding to their advertised vacancies, they seldom provided documentation to prove that non-nationals had these qualifications when they requested employment permits for them.
“It is of vital importance for us to know that the foreign worker has the qualifications that they had requested of the local worker. If they cannot provide that information we will advise the Executive Council to turn down the request,” Boasman said.
“We usually send a notice requesting the employer to bring in this information within a week; otherwise, we will be forced to put a negative advice to it. Many do not provide the information, but they complain. We try not to keep the application longer than a week, because we will develop backlogs.”
Employers, he said, usually have a misconception that the five-week mandatory period to advertise the vacancy at the Labour Department is part of the six-week employment permit processing period.
He said these were two completely differently processes. Advertising the vacancy for five weeks is to allow the department to mediate and recommend someone from the local market, while the six-week period is separate to process the application.
In certain cases where the application involves highly skilled persons who probably are not available in the local market, the five-week period to advertise the vacancy is not rigidly enforced.
“If the hospital needs a surgeon, for example, it is unlikely we will have any unemployed surgeons walking around, so to insist that the hospital wait for five weeks will be unrealistic,” he said. “But if someone needs to employ a waiter, a front desk clerk or a cook, the chances are big that there are people in the local labour market to do the job. It is the job of the employer to find someone in the local labour market.”
“Most companies do not just wake up one day and decide they will hire 10 people tomorrow. It’s a planning process. They know if their business has expanded and whether they will need additional people,” he said.
He said another misconception among some employers was that local workers were not available if the Department didn’t send them potential employees when they submitted their vacancy forms.
“It’s not whether we send them anyone or not. Our job is to mediate between the parties. There are (unemployed) people who have requested our assistance in the mediation and there may be many others who haven’t requested our assistance and we cannot just ignore them,” he said.
He said too that many students took up positions outside their fields temporarily until they found jobs in their areas, and while they might not be registered as unemployed, they should not be ignored.
“The assumption that ‘the Labour Office has not sent me anybody so there is nobody’ is totally wrong,” he said.
