United States

The Department of Labor (DOL) is moving ahead with its plans to centralize prevailing wage processing. The agency is scheduled to open its prevailing wage center in Washington, DC and begin centralized processing of several additional case types on January 1. 2010. The processing of prevailing wage determinations for the permanent labor certification program and for the H-1B, H-1B1, and E-3 nonimmigrant programs will be included in the January transition. Earlier this year, DOL centralized prevailing wage determinations for the H-2B and H-1C nonimmigrant programs at the National Processing Center in Chicago.

Under the new, centralized process, prevailing wage requests will be submitted directly to the DOL national center rather than to the State Workforce Agencies (SWAs). The December 2008 rule announcing the change did not make any substantive changes to how prevailing wages are determined, but shifted the responsibility for making such determinations from the SWAs to the national center. Employers will still be able to use independent authoritative wage sources and supplemental wage information, provided such information qualifies under existing rules. The SWAs are scheduled to continue to accept and process prevailing wage requests submitted prior to January 1, 2010. There are no plans to ship cases started at the SWAs to the national center at any point. Cases started at the SWAs prior to the first of the year should remain with the SWAs.

Currently, processing times for prevailing wage requests vary widely among the SWAs and determinations are not always consistent. Employers should be aware that the national center may take a different approach than some SWAs to making prevailing wage determinations and that processing times may increase from the current processing times at some SWAs. As with any new program, there may be some initial inconsistency, but DOL anticipates that centralization should result in more consistent prevailing wage determinations over time, particularly with regard to the acceptance of independent authoritative wage sources and the assignment of occupational categories and wage levels.

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