Monday, July 23, 2007

Leroy Dixon built his party company from the ground up 13 years ago by putting one stake in the ground after the other and tying together a roster of events which includes big Chesapeake Bay festivals and small backyard weddings. Mostly he builds tents and canopies, labor-intensive work that must often be done at odd hours.

As Party Plus grew, Dixon, his wife, Lauri, and their son, Lee, quickly identified the largest obstacle to their success: finding reliable workers.

"People only rent tents in the warm weather," said Dixon, whose company is based in Glen Burnie. It was next to impossible, he said, to recruit and retain workers willing to stick with a job that pays $8 an hour plus overtime and promises long hours of physical labor in the spring and summer and a virtual work stoppage in the winter.

For the first time last year, Dixon hired a lawyer to help him apply for a government program that lets seasonal businesses hire foreign nationals for nine months each year.

The program, known as H-2B for its legislative designation, admitted 121,000 foreign workers last year on temporary visas. Six were Mexican men working for Dixon -- under the H2-B title of circus laborer -- putting up tents, loading and unloading chairs, some days from sunup to sundown.

"The fellas that come up here, they work extremely hard," said Dixon, who has been in the party business with his wife since the mid-1980s. "Their work ethic is phenomenal. They can literally do the work of two people we get from a temporary day-labor source, and that is not an exaggeration."

With his belated discovery of the 17-year-old H-2B worker program, Dixon believed he had a solution -- until his request for workers last year got caught in a bureaucratic snag among the three federal agencies that must approve every request for foreign workers.

By the third week in May, the six Mexican workers Dixon requested still had not been approved to enter the United States and bus up to Maryland. They were nearly a month behind schedule, and Party Plus was in one of its busiest and most lucrative periods. In a two-week span, Dixon is responsible for preparing the tents, setting the chairs, building the staging and putting up the lighting and video projection for the graduation ceremonies of Montgomery College and community colleges in Anne Arundel, Howard and Hartford counties.

"If I don't get it done, I'm in breach of contract," Dixon said.

As the graduations hit, the foreign workers still had not received the government's required approvals, and Dixon had to hire temporary day-laborers from recruiters who charge a hefty fee.

"My profit for the graduations goes right out the window, and typically when you are hiring folks from temporary agencies they don't have the same desire that we do to get the job done," Dixon said.

He slogged through the graduations but called the office of his senator, Barbara A. Mikulski, to complain. Mikulski and her staffers, who had intervened in the past for crab houses on the Eastern Shore, helped push his application along, Dixon said. By June his temporary workers had their approvals.

Party Plus's Mexican workers are to return to their homeland in early December. Dixon hopes to bring them back next year.