Magic Pot of Jobs

The company I work for is a large, multinational staffing firm with offices across the US. The offices closest to the areas affected by hurricane Katrina have been seeing an influx of applicants who are displaced hurricane victims, looking for work as they try to rebuild their lives.

The problem is, many of them have lost important identity paperwork with all their other belongings, and can’t provide the necessary paperwork to prove their employment eligibility.

My company’s legal department started lobbying Congress to grant an exception to the I-9 regulations so we could legally start putting these people to work. They didn’t quite get that, but just as good:

The Department of Homeland Security is going to suspend enforcement of I-9 provisions for employers hiring Katrina victims for 45 days. Employers should fill out the form as much as possible, and note in the document section that documents are unavailable due to the hurricane.

This gives hurricane victims time to try to collect copies of documents that were lost. Follow these steps to replace a lost Social Security card- the problem is, the documents proving place of birth were likely to have been lost as well. Certified copies of birth certificates can be obtained from most places, but that’s a problem for people born in hurricane-affected areas. Contact the Social Security administration for advice in that case.

The form for replacing a lost passport is available from the State Department.

And for the rest of us fortunate enough to not be directly affected by the hurricane, let it be a lesson to us all: Keep documents relating to your identity in a safe place, so that you can grab them quickly in case of an emergency. You’ll need them to find work in the event of an extended displacement.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 7th, 2005 at 7:42 pm and is filed under Meta. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.