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| Why Ameica needs Immigrant Labour ... |
Erewhon |
05/23/06 |
A Job Americans Won't Do, Even at $34 an Hour
Some landscape firms rebut claims that higher pay, not immigration reform, is needed.
By David Streitfeld, Times Staff Writer
May 18, 2006
Cyndi Smallwood is looking for a few strong men for her landscaping company. Guys with no fear of a hot sun, who can shovel dirt all day long. She'll pay as much as $34 an hour.
She can't find them.
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Maybe potential employees don't know about her tiny Riverside firm. Maybe the problem is Southern California's solid economy and low unemployment rate. Or maybe manual labor is something that many Americans couldn't dream of doing.
"I'm baffled why more people do not apply," Smallwood says.
President Bush is not. In his speech to the nation Monday night, he referred to "jobs Americans are not doing," echoing a point he has been making for years. To fill these spurned jobs and keep the economy humming, Bush says, the U.S. needs a guest worker program.
Otherwise, the logic goes, fruit will rot in the fields, offices will overflow with trash and lawns and parks will revert to desert.
Countering that view, opponents of a guest worker program say that Americans would find the jobs more enticing if there wasn't foreign competition to swell the labor pool and push wages down.
Smallwood is ambivalent on immigration reform, saying demands for immediate citizenship by those who entered the country illegally are offensive. But without a guest worker program, she says, her company probably will not survive.
"To get workers, you have to steal them from other companies," the 54-year-old entrepreneur says.
Even that has been unproductive recently. She'd ideally like to add eight employees by the end of the year to her current staff of 12.
The lawn and landscape business in California is heavily Latino, with an abundance of illegal immigrants. In a study of Los Angeles County's "off-the-books" labor force, the Economic Roundtable, a nonprofit research organization, estimated that a quarter of the landscape workers were undocumented. That leaves the companies vulnerable to crackdowns, which has them agitating for guest workers.
At Smallwood's company, Diversified Landscape Management, there's one white employee, an engineer. The other employees are Latino and, as far as Smallwood can tell, all in the country legally. Her employees need driver's licenses and the ability to move through freeway checkpoints near the border, which tend to eliminate any with fake papers.
Thirty years ago, those in the landscape industry say, white crews were common. Now, says Jim Newtson, a San Diego contractor, "if you see a white guy, you do a double-take, like when you saw an interracial couple back in the 1960s."
Managers in the business explain it as a cultural shift, saying that native-born, middle-class Americans of all races and ethnic backgrounds tend to look down on manual labor. That leaves immigrants to do the work.
"The people I grew up with 40 years ago expected to work hard physically," says Bob Wade of Wade Landscape in Laguna Beach.
"This is a pretty pampered little town. The kids don't expect to work hard," Wade says. "A lot don't expect to work at all. They just float."
Wade fired one employee three times, the last time for going to look at girls on the beach instead of spraying weeds. The employee — his son — now works in the restaurant industry.
Larger economic forces come into play too. Orange County, for example, consistently has the lowest jobless rate in the state. Although that could be a draw for laborers in states with high unemployment, the high housing prices in the county act as a brake on that sort of migration.
Smallwood grew up doing manual labor. The daughter of a sharecropper in Mississippi, she had to pick her share of cotton from age 6. "I wouldn't do that again for any price," she says.
When she moved to California, she worked as a property manager, then developed a lawn-care business, which she sold in 1998. The death of her only child, Michael, from a drug overdose two years later drew her outside to her own garden. "I watered, fertilized, planted and pruned, determined that nothing else was going to die on me," she says.
===
Will you take the job? |
Clarification/Follow-up by ETWolverine on 05/23/06 2:06 pm:
Oh, by the way, Bob Wade, who is also mentioned above, is also a member of the CLCA's Immigration Task Force like Cyndi Smallwood. Two out of three people named in the article are members of the same activist goup, but neither are identified as such. I wonder why...
I haven't found Jim Newton's name, but then again, he doesn't say anything either pro-amnesty or anti-amnesty in the article. He just talks about the current racial makeup of the industry.
Clarification/Follow-up by ETWolverine on 05/23/06 2:50 pm:
Ronnie,
If this was posted just to see if we could improve our incomes, why did you title your post with "Why Ameica needs Immigrant Labour"? (It's "labor", not "labour". This is America, speak Spanish.)
Elliot Clarification/Follow-up by Erewhon on 05/23/06 6:11 pm:
Elliot,
It is 'labour.'
Exodus 5:9
9 Let there more work be laid upon the men, that they may labour therein; and let them not regard vain words.
We gave you a free language, and see what you have made of it!
�Sin embargo, �sa es vida, s�?
:)
Clarification/Follow-up by Itsdb on 05/23/06 8:57 pm:
Ronnie, thefreedictionary.com says it's Middle English, from Old French labour, from Latin labor. Webster agrees. We changed it back to the original. :) Clarification/Follow-up by Erewhon on 05/23/06 10:44 pm:
So, your national language is Latin? That's closer to Spanish than it is to English.
�S�, podemos!
LOL
Clarification/Follow-up by ETWolverine on 05/24/06 7:20 pm:
Ronnie,
With tansliterations from Hebrew, especially ancient Hebrew, there are so many versions of the transliteration, and all of them can be technically correct. But yes, the site that I got it from uses Sephardic pronounciations for the most part (except when there's a specific reason not to).
Elliot
Clarification/Follow-up by fredg on 05/26/06 3:07 pm:
There have been some very good comments about Social Welfare Programs in the US. The county in which I live has about 69% of the citizens on some type of SSI, Disability, etc, drawing checks every month from the Federal Gov't.
I, myself, get a check every month, but it's Social Security Retirement; which with enough working credits, is open to all at the appropriate age.
I am astounded at the number of people who ARE physically able to work, but don't! If it were not for being the "primary care giver" for my wife and her health issues, I would still be working a full-time job.
I know for a fact that some I know on SSI, goes out, works, and gets paid "under the table".
The American Federal Gov't does NOT oversee programs very well at all. Laws are made, and once that happens, never rescinded. We need change!
fredg
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