Cinram using temporary visa employees

Eastofhuntsville.com

It was just over two weeks ago that local apartment owners began raising red flags about some of their tenants, temporary immigrant workers, were missing. The workers were brought to America on H2-B work visa as temporary help for the holidays at local DVD manufacturer Cinram, Inc.

Cinram is a Canadian company with several locations across the country, their Huntsville plant can be found at the intersection of Moores Mill and Highway 72. The plant located at the bottom of Chapman Mountain experiences a significant surge in business in preparation for Christmas DVD sales and regularly hires temporary workers to ensure adequate capacity.

Late last summer, Cinram made application to fill the Christmas need by bring in 1,500 plus temporary employees from outside the United States. In October the first of the approximately 1,100 foreign workers began arriving from Jamaica, Nepal, Bolivia, Ukraine, and the Dominican Republic.

As attention was drawn to the missing workers, most of whom are Nepali and have left for better paying jobs, the spotlight also fell on the apartment owners / managers who raised the issue. And that light has not revealed a pretty picture in some cases.

Truitt Evans, enforcement coordinator for the Fair Housing Center of Northern Alabama, confirmed yesterday to The Huntsville Times (see Workers' Housing Probed) that they are investigating the living conditions in which these workers were living. Some workers were apparently paying full-price to share an apartment with three or four other workers. Their investigation is still underway.

Doug Wilson is president of Ambassador temporary agency, the company that worked with Cinram to bring the foreign employees into the States. He told the Times that his company has worked with 20 landlords to provide housing upon arrival and has had difficulties with only two. Ambassador inspected apartments prior to the workers' arrival, the real challenges began when apartment owners started competing with one another for occupants.

Wilson goes on to say that despite some problems, bringing in foreign workers helps Cinram keep its 2,500 plus permanent workers and $120 million payroll at the Moores Mill plant.

This is some serious WTFish for me to run across. I'm just looking around for any other online posts about the closure and I find this article from a year ago.

The Richmond plant has been pretty slow for awhile now. We've got a ton of capacity. Why in gods glorious world did they decide to bring in thousands of foreign workers instead of shipping some product to their more idle plants for processing? There have been hundreds of people at the Richmond plant on unemployment for awhile now that could have been working, instead of sitting at home doing nothing for nothing.