Dozens of employees of the Vermont Service Center, a federal immigration office in Essex, received layoff notices on Tuesday, according to union officials.
The Vermont Department of Labor confirmed Wednesday that it had received notice of layoffs but did not indicate how many.
According to Joy Palm, a local steward for the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America, 74 employees at the center received notices. Zachary Knipe, another union representative, said the layoffs amount to nearly half of the 170 workers employed at the facility.
Workers at the service center are employed by ITC Federal, a contractor based in Virginia. The contract workers provide back-office support to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.
The layoffs mark a continued reduction in employees at the center — part of a broader shift by the federal government to draw down paper-based immigration filing and move toward electronic filing, according to USCIS records obtained by VTDigger.
Nearly 400 workers were once employed at the center in Essex, according to Knipe. Its employees are represented by his union.
“There’s been this long period of attrition that’s gotten us to this point,” he said.
Knipe said there are continued fears that there will soon be no jobs left at the center. He pointed to the California Service Center, which, until recently, employed more than 400 workers. As of Nov. 15, it has no employees working, according to Knipe.
“We’ve not gotten official word on where this ultimately is headed, but we are proceeding under the assumption that we’re looking at a complete shutdown of contractor work at the Vermont Service Center,” he said.
Neither USCIS nor ITC Federal responded to requests for comment on Wednesday.
Months of uncertainty
Workers and union officials have in recent months received little information on whether or when layoffs might occur.
But both USCIS and ITC Federal, union officials have previously alleged, have engaged in a pattern of union-busting — with each claiming the other has responsibility for decisions about staffing levels at the center.
ITC Federal over the past year began transferring much of the work performed at the Vermont Service Center to its Nebraska Service Center, located in a “right-to-work” state that prohibits union agreements requiring employees to provide dues, according to union officials, while the Vermont Service Center remains in a hiring freeze. Other work has been transferred to the Texas Service Center, a non-union location.
Union officials’ requests for more information were routinely stonewalled, they said, leaving employees feeling demoralized.
The issue drew the attention of U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., who in an Aug. 21 letter expressed “deep concern” over the anticipated layoffs at the Vermont Service Center.
Sanders wrote at the time that Vermont Service Center workers, union officials and members of his staff had received “minimal, vague, and even conflicting, information” from USCIS about the layoffs. He said he was discouraged by the agency’s “trend of shifting work” from union to non-union shops.
That frustration has only grown since then.
Bonnie Whitcomb, a 62-year-old South Burlington resident and lifelong Vermonter, came out of retirement a little more than two years ago to start working at the Vermont Service Center.
She was one of the many employees at the center who received a layoff notice on Tuesday, she said in a phone interview.
Rumors had been circulating for months among staff about plans to draw down work at the center, she said, but employees were “in shock” nonetheless when layoff notices were given out Tuesday, Whitcomb said.
Employees were left feeling frustrated after months of uncertainty.
“Trying to get information out of ITC or the government is like pulling teeth,” Whitcomb said. “They’ll stand in front of you and tell you one thing, and then two minutes later they’ll do another thing.”
Whitcomb said she is actively looking for a new job, but is unsure she’ll find a comparable income elsewhere.
“Times are tough,” she said. “People are out there looking for jobs but struggling to find the same pay, and their income is going way down.”
She added, “Even though it does say that there are a lot of jobs out there, which there are, there are not a lot of jobs out there who pay … what the union has been able to get us, or even close to that.”
Though the precise number of layoffs at the Vermont Service Center remains unclear, a notice of intent sent to ITC Federal and obtained by VTDigger shows that USCIS officials intend to draw down staffing at the Vermont Service Center to 77 employees.
How long those jobs would remain is also unclear. USCIS Director Ur Jaddou, in a response to Sen. Sanders’ letter, suggested that contractor support services at the Vermont Service Center would soon “be ending.”
The current contractor work is to “primarily perform data entry and paper-based records functions,” duties that Jaddou said “are being reduced at USCIS with the move to increased electronic filing and processing.”
Jaddou, in response to a question posed by Sanders about the future economic well-being of workers who lose their positions, said that while USCIS “cannot guarantee permanent federal jobs to contract workers, contract workers may apply for any federal job announcements open to the public.”
Jaddou added, “Many contract workers often successfully apply for and get hired to federal positions.”
ITC Federal has not offered severance pay or benefits to the workers laid off in Vermont, according to Knipe.
“All indications are that there will be no severance provided, even though we know if these workers were federal employees, there would be a relatively generous severance package available to them,” Knipe said. “Despite their reluctance to do the right thing and honor the years of service that these people have provided, we will be demanding severance benefits.”
Correction: An earlier version of this story used incorrect pronouns for Ur Jaddou.
