A clash of interests on guest workers

LAST WEEK Democratic Senator Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts and Republican Senator John McCain of Arizona unveiled an immigration reform package that would create a temporary visa program to regulate entry into the United States and provide a path to citizenship for those currently working here without papers. There will be a buzz saw of opposition from all directions, from advocates for unconditional amnesty to those who recommend mass deportations and a wall at our southern border.

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The only point of agreement in the polarizing debate is that the current system is not working. Official estimates suggest that there are between 8 million and 9 million undocumented immigrants in the country. A recent Bear Stearns study claims a more accurate number would be between 18 million and 20 million. Those individuals are washing dishes, cleaning rooms, changing bed pans, landscaping, and building houses in every state in the Union.

Guest worker program proponents claim that these jobs cannot be filled by US citizens. In some cases, that may be true, but in others the lack of interest is based on the degraded compensation standards, not the job itself. A further argument has been made that these men and women who will never collect retirement benefits in this country are actually subsidizing the Social Security system by as much as $7 billion a year, but many more are forced into employment arrangements in which no taxes are paid and all wage payments are off the books. They are absorbed into the nation's growing underground economy, estimated to be nearly $3 trillion a year and 9 percent of the ''real" economy. This year, the gap between taxes collected and taxes that should be paid is expected to be $400 billion.

For all the talk of a crisis, no action has been taken because the system is working for too many businesses that hire undocumented immigrants. Employers in certain industries have welcomed these workers as a means to drive down costs and assert absolute workplace control. The last major congressional initiative in 1986 attempted to address the issue of worker abuse by including penalties for employers that knowingly hired illegal aliens. But the legal requirement to prove intent ensured that very few cases were ever prosecuted.

Construction has been particularly vulnerable because there has always been a cash-based element at the margins of the industry. The burgeoning undocumented workforce has allowed these practices to extend into large-scale mainstream projects where employers are particularly eager to avoid the high cost of workers' compensation insurance. In the dangerous world of construction, the consequences can be lethal. A few weeks ago, two Mexican carpenters working for a large luxury Missouri builder fell four stories from inadequate scaffolding. One was killed instantly, and the other received near-crippling injuries. They had been paid $9 an hour in cash and, when the accident occurred, the firm denied any relationship and responsibility. A former superintendent reported that this had been a longstanding and unchallenged company policy.

Similar employment practices are in effect on multimillion-dollar projects in Massachusetts. Workers are paid in cash and, thus, are invisible to authorities. Alternately, they may be illegally misclassified as ''independent contractors," a more sophisticated scheme that still allows employers to avoid tax and workers' compensation obligations. Certainly not every participant in the underground economy is foreign-born, and many undocumented immigrants work under conventional employment arrangements, but the growing and troublesome phenomenon of cash-based employment and employee misclassification have become enmeshed in the need for comprehensive immigration reform.

The Kennedy-McCain proposal will have to navigate the treacherous political minefields of border enforcement and what, if any, the path to citizenship will be. As part of the debate, legislators also have to unravel the tangled participation of immigrant workers in the underground economy and insist that work visas be tied to the status of an employee. There is an opportunity to address the excessive resulting burdens on US workers and taxpayers and, at the same time, release undocumented immigrant workers from their current state of indentured servitude and allow them the same rights and protections as all other employees.

Mark Erlich is business representative of Carpenters Local 40.