Labor unions that have been left out of major construction projects in southwest Louisiana are blasting Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry after The Times-Picayune |The Advocate reported Friday that companies owned by Landry or his brother brought in hundreds of Mexican workers to handle the jobs instead.
“He needs to resign,” said Dennis Miller, who represents Laborers Local 99 in Louisiana and Mississippi. “You have a guy who represents Louisiana, supposed to represent the people to uplift our state, and doing something like this … It’s just unacceptable.”
Story via partnership with WWL-TV in New Orleans
The United Association represents the pipefitters and welders who sought the precise jobs that ended up going to Mexican workers who were furnished with so-called H-2B visas by Landry’s companies.
UA International Representative Lance Albin said he was disappointed that Landry would bring in Mexican workers to build a liquefied natural gas facility in Cameron Parish that receives lucrative state tax incentives for creating local jobs.
“I was shocked and appalled that Attorney General Landry would participate in, much less profit from, a program like the H-2B visa program, which displaces Louisiana workers and their families in favor of foreign workers,” Albin said, adding that he believes the H-2B visa program itself contradicts Landry’s oft-stated position on protecting American jobs.
Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry, who has railed against loose borders and lax immigration policies during his four years as the state’s…
“What good is building a border wall if we give people secret doors?” Albin said.
Landry’s spokesman Brent Littlefield said Friday that the attorney general is still against illegal immigration and "sanctuary cities" that refuse to help deport undocumented workers. Littlefield said the Landry firms turned to Mexican workers for the Cameron LNG project when no qualified Americans answered their classified ad in the Lake Charles newspaper.
Records from the Louisiana Workforce Commission show that 113 U.S. workers applied for those jobs. Littlefield and Landry have ducked questions about whether any of them were hired, and if not, why they weren’t.
Labor broker Marco Pesquera, who helped the Landrys recruit Mexican welders and pipefitters and also advised them on how to secure the H-2B visas, has said no Americans were hired for the work. That was the plan from the start, Pesquera said.
Pesquera is now serving a three-year sentence in federal prison for visa fraud. He was convicted in a scheme that did not include the Landrys or their companies, though he said his dealings with them incorporated his typical playbook, including bogus contracts, shell companies and other subterfuges.
Albin said his pipefitters and welders union could have filled as many as 600 skilled positions on the Cameron LNG project if the builders — formerly CB&I and now a joint venture between Chiyoda Corp. and McDermott International — had been willing to hire UA members.
The role of the firms owned by Landry and his brother Benjamin came to light when Pesquera provided a raft of documents to The Times-Picayune |The Advocate just before he reported to prison.
Attorney General Jeff Landry and his accountant brother, Benjamin Landry, partnered with a since-convicted visa fraudster, Marco Pesquera, in …
He told the newspaper he wanted to reduce his sentence by providing information about the Landrys, but federal prosecutors declined to offer him a cooperation agreement.
Littlefield went on WWL-AM on Friday and called the newspaper's story "bogus" and "misleading." Prior to the story appearing in the newspaper or online, Jeff Landry’s campaign had recorded a video of Benjamin Landry seeking to debunk the upcoming story.
“They're relying on the words and actions of this convicted felon or his associates,” Benjamin Landry said in the video.
In his radio appearance, Littlefield said: “The folks who are building that facility just felt like they had exhausted all avenues to get the (local) workers for that temporary work.”
But Miller and Albin said that’s not true. Southwest Louisiana has become one of the nation’s busiest hubs for industrial construction amid a boom in U.S. natural gas production over the last decade, and the demand for welders and other skilled workers was long foreseen.
“We did a lot of work to get ready because we knew that work was coming. We built a new training center in Lake Charles, to the tune of about $4.5 million,” Albin said. “We have the facility there and the infrastructure to flip the switch and get more folks there if we need them. But the demand just hasn’t been there for us since we did that investment because we have not gotten (hired) on these projects.”
Albin and Miller said they were told at the start of the Cameron LNG export terminal project in 2014 that the project owner, Sempra, and its builders were not going to hire any union workers.
“We were told in no uncertain terms that our members weren’t needed,” Miller said.
Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry stayed out of the public eye Friday, making no public remarks or appearances, in the wake of an investi…
Littlefield said the Landry firms paid the Mexican workers federal prevailing wages, as required by the H-2B visa program.
But Miller and Albin said that's cheap compared to the rates paid to unionized American workers. That’s not the only reason employers like the visa program. Because the visas are tied to specific work assignments, the Mexican workers who use them can’t leave to seek other work once they’re hired.
Pesquera was first accused of defrauding the guest-worker visa program in federal court in Texas in 2016, when he was sued in a civil racketeering case.
More than a year later, he hired Landry's firms to provide the labor at the Cameron LNG facility and a separate project. But Littlefield said Jeff Landry and his brother had no idea they were teaming with a crook.
“We had not worked with this Texas company before, and we found ourselves fighting to get paid,” Benjamin Landry said in the video.
Documents show Benjamin Landry filed liens against Pesquera’s company, Pangea, and got it fired from the Cameron LNG project.
Littlefield said the Landrys helped federal investigators when the U.S. Department of Labor and State Department contacted them about the fraud case against Pesquera’s company in Texas. However, William Hagen, the lead prosecutor in Pesquera’s case, has said he never spoke to Benjamin Landry or heard from him regarding the Texas prosecution.
