Thread: A Job Americans Won't Do, Even at $34 an Hour

http://www.landscapeonline.com/research/article/6720

Landscapers Lobby Senate on Immigration


Landscaping business owners are crossing the country to lobby lawmakers, shoot TV ads and speak to journalists about the industry’s huge stake in the immigration debate. Businesses will be crippled if enforcement is beefed up without an accompanying guest-worker program, the group of leaders is telling lawmakers and anyone who’ll listen.

David Penry of Pacific Landscapes, Inc. got involved when the House of Representatives passed its enforcement-only bill in December. Lobbying in Washington, D.C. in March, he caught the ear of the Manhattan Institute’s Tamar Jacoby, a leading writer on immigration and a conservative advocate for immigration reform.

Struck by his passion, Jacoby suggested he appear in a television spot aimed at Washington lawmakers.

Penry talked it over with business partner Darryl Orr.

“I realized there was a potential downside,” he recalled. “But we decided that Pacific Landscapes Inc. had to take a public position on the issue.”

The spot ran on April 1 and cost $130,000 to shoot and air.

Soon the Sonoma County, Calif. businessman was taking calls from The Wall Street Journal and the Los Angeles Times.

The Times featured him in an April 6 story on the issue.

“This was very, very scary, doomsday legislation for business,” he told the paper. “When the House bill passed, I realized it needs to be all hands on board. I was shocked.”

Cyndi Smallwood is another California Landscape Contractors Association member who traveled to Washington in March. Articulate and passionate, she found herself quoted in the Sacramento Bee, the Orange County Register and other news outlets.

“I was most shocked at the Republican Party being against small business,” she told the Bee. “They don’t get that there is a labor shortage.”

Smallwood operates Diversified Landscape Management in Mission Viejo, Calif.

The Senate debate has sparked a firestorm that has turned into one of the biggest issues today. Emotions are strong on both sides. The Senate debate is continuing, and the storm of controversy shows no sign of blowing over.

The Los Angeles Times produced this graphic based on data from the Pew Hispanic Center. At least of quarter of the nation’s “grounds workers” are undocumented, the Pew data says. View full Size Image


Other landscaping business owners can join the lobbying and educational effort. Interested parties should contact their state or local landscape contractors’ associations.

Working for the cause pays off, Penry said.

“When you sit down and explain the facts to people, they usually listen—and you can often change their opinion,” he said.

More information is available at the American Nursery and Landscape Association and Professional Landcare Network web sites. The addresses are: www.anla.org or www.landcarenetwork.org.

http://www.pe.com

Dependent on labor
Bill cracking down on illegal immigrants fought by many who employ, sell to them


08:52 AM PST on Thursday, March 30, 2006
By JONATHAN SHIKES, SHARON McNARY, KIMBERLY PIERCEALL and PAUL HERRERA
The Press-Enterprise


Organizers behind the recent immigrant-rights demonstrations -- the largest such mobilization in decades -- are shooting for something even bigger, a day when undocumented immigrants stay home from work and out of stores.

Paul Alvarez / The Press-Enterprise
"Businesses like our 99-cent stores are dependent on the medium to low-income familes," says Kent Patel, a naturalized citizen who emigrated from India 21 years ago and owns one of the discount retailers in Riverside. He guesses that perhaps 5 percent of his customers might be here illegally. If illegal immigrants are deported under a House bill, Patel says, "Our sales would go down."

A national Latino boycott might not have a long-term economic impact, but it could certainly show how ingrained undocumented workers are in the U.S. economy.

It could also illustrate why so many billion-dollar business trade groups have opposed proposed federal legislation that would make life here harder for illegal immigrants and, in turn, for the companies that employ them and sell to them.

The March 25 Coalition, a large umbrella organization of groups that organized the massive Los Angeles demonstration Saturday has called a news conference today at 1 p.m. to announce its strategies for opposing efforts to toughen immigration law and legislation approved by the U.S. House of Representatives.

Among the options they are considering is a call for a more student walkouts and a general boycott May 1, said coalition member Alejandro Ahumada of Yucaipa.

The House bill includes strict border enforcement, harsh penalties for companies that employ illegal workers and criminal prosecutions of people who help undocumented immigrants cross the border. Its author said the intent was to target rings involved in smuggling immigrants across the border.

Instead, many industries want new laws to focus on ways to allow immigrants to legally work in the U.S., either permanently or as guest workers.

The proposed legislation has inspired massive rallies and student walkouts in California, Texas, Arizona and other states over the past week. A rally in Los Angeles last Saturday drew about half a million people.

On Tuesday, nearly 15,000 students participated in protests in Los Angeles, Orange, San Diego, Riverside and San Bernardino counties.

"Cracking down on the businesses would get rid of the problem, but it would also get rid of the economy," said David Hayes-Bautista, director of the Center for the Study of Latino Health and Culture at UCLA.

Undocumented workers make up 4.9 percent of U.S. workers, or about 7.2 million people, including one in four farm laborers and one in seven construction workers, according to the Pew Hispanic Center, which conducts nonpartisan policy research in Washington, D.C.

Laundries, restaurants, hotels, cleaning companies, retail stores, landscapers and poultry and meat packers also rely heavily on this labor pool.

Riverside and San Bernardino counties, where farming, building and tourism are major industries, are home to 215,000 undocumented residents, second in the nation to Los Angeles County, according to Jeffrey Passel, a Pew demographer.

Of that, about 142,000 are in the labor force, according to Passel's estimates, or roughly 11 percent of the Inland Empire's total working population.

If undocumented workers stayed home, "this whole country would go down the drain," said George Flores, a 32-year-old permanent resident who is considering applying for citizenship.

"Man, 50 percent of the Latinos don't have papers and they're still working. If they were to stop, there would be some drama," said Flores, who was chatting with friends Wednesday outside La Tapatia meat market in Riverside.

Kent Patel, 47, said a one-day strike by undocumented immigrants would not hurt his 99-Cent Warehouse store on Chicago Avenue in Riverside, but longer work stoppages would take a toll.

"If they don't go to work, then they do not have much money, and they could not spend the money," said Patel, who presumes about 5 percent of his customers are undocumented.

Deeply Embedded

The interest by big business in immigration legislation is "a symptom of how deeply embedded in our economy all of this is," Bautista said.

The immigrant work force is also what keeps fruit and vegetable prices low, hotel rooms affordable and the housing industry moving, he asserted.

"The people in this country will not do this work no matter how much you pay them," said Ed Boutonnet, president and chief executive officer of Ocean Mist Farms, a company with a large farming operation in the Coachella Valley.

"If there's a really strict enforcement bill ... there still could be some people who find their way" across the border, said California Farm Bureau President Doug Mosebar. "But there would not be anywhere near the numbers to harvest the crops."

Farmers such as Boutonnet and Mark Draper, a former farm-labor contractor who owns a sod farm in Thermal, are vehemently opposed to HR 4437 -- known as the Sensenbrenner bill -- which includes some of the strictest measures.

Instead they like a Senate bill that includes a guest-worker program and a way for the nation's estimated 10 to 12 million undocumented immigrants to gain legal citizenship.

It's unrealistic to expect any policy to end illegal immigration, however, said Phil Martin, a professor and immigration expert at UC Davis.

"What agriculture is worried about is that the growth of the influx would slow, not stop altogether," he said. If it did, the industries that use immigrant labor would simply adjust.

Trade Groups Unite

Several trade groups, including those representing construction, retail, restaurant, hospitality and lawn-maintenance organizations, have also joined together to fight HR 4437 under a lobbying group called Essential Worker Immigration Coalition.

"[The bill] doesn't fix the system, it just focuses on enforcement," said John Gay, chairman of the coalition and the vice president of government affairs and public policy for the National Restaurant Association in Washington, D.C.

While business organizations have expressed support for tighter security at the border, their main objective is to ensure a future work force, said Cyndi Smallwood, owner of Riverside's Diversified Landscape Management, Inc.

"We need these workers, but we need them documented," said Smallwood, who belongs to a trade group in the coalition.

Many of the buses that brought hundreds of Coachella Valley residents to demonstrate in Los Angeles last weekend were paid for by local business owners, said Mario Lazcano, a member of Comite Latino, which was formed in January.

A Political Bind

The issue has put some typically pro-business politicians in a tough position, said Shawn McBurney, vice president of government affairs for the American Hotel and Lodging Association, which is part of the Essential Worker coalition.

"Do you want to vote for border security or not?" he asked. But that security has to come with a guest-worker program, he explained.

Rep. Mary Bono, R-Palm Springs, said she supports a guest-worker program, even though she co-sponsored HR 4437, which omitted such a plan.

The Republican leadership has promised her that a separate bill addressing a guest-worker program would be introduced in the spring, she said. If not, she said she will pressure her colleagues to include a guest-worker plan in HR 4437.

"I've been approached by not only my growers," but by golf-course landscaping companies and the hospitality industry on the issue, she said.

Lara Dunbar, vice president of government affairs for the California Restaurant Association, said the industry supports reform that would not only offer a future labor pool, such as a guest-worker program, but also a way to allow existing undocumented workers to retain their jobs and apply for legal status. Dunbar said the provisions, all contained in legislation before the U.S. Senate, are particularly important for restaurants in Southern California and other border states.

National Boycott

Though Gay doesn't condone mass walkouts, he said he understands why some companies would give employees time off to attend a rally or a one-day strike.

The concept was tried with mixed success in Georgia last week, where large numbers of immigrant workers stayed away from work and out of stores.

National strikes are rare in the United States. Famous examples include the Montgomery bus boycott led by Martin Luther King Jr. and the table-grape boycott led by Cesar Chavez.

Bautista isn't confident that a national boycott will happen.

"I've been hearing about it for 35 years, so I take it with a grain of salt," he said. "But the massive outpouring last Saturday, I had not seen. That was new."

Reach Jonathan Shikes at (951) 368-9552 or jshikes@PE.com, Sharon McNary at (951) 368-9458 or smcnary@PE.com, Kimberly Pierceall at (760) 837-4410 or kpierceall@PE.com or Paul Herrera at (951) 368-9452 or pherrera@PE.com.

http://insideriverside.blogspot.com/200 ... o-not.html

A $34 an hour job American's won't do? Not quite.
5/18/2006 07:47:00 PM


The LA Times has an article today titled, no kidding, "A Job Americans Won't Do, Even at $34 an Hour".

What kind of job that pays $34 an hour won't American's do?

Could it be scrubbing containment vessels of spent nuclear reactors? Nope.

How about volunteering for open brain surgery at the local community college? Not quite.

Man-eating lion tamer? Wrong again.

The job is, gasp, landscaping.

The LA Times interviewed Cyndi Smallwood, a small business woman who runs Diversified Landscape right here in Riverside.

According to the Times:

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.
If anyone bothers to read past the headline and first paragraph they will learn that Cyndi already has 12 employees. She says all of her employees are legally allowed to work here.

So what is the problem?

The real problem appears to be Cyndi's preferred method of advertising her $34 an hour job American's won't do; word of mouth. I'm sure she is reaching a vast audience doing that.

Now you may be wondering why anyone would pay $34 an hour for landscaping. Well it's not up to Cyndi. You see she does contract work for the State of California and they set the pay rates.

This afternoon Cyndi was on the John and Ken Show. She told them that since the article appeared in the LA Times this morning she has received over 30 resumes. Yep, 30 resumes in just a few short hours for a job American's won't do. Cyndi may want to re-think her not-so-hi-tech word of mouth advertising campaign.

John and Ken took some calls from the audience. Cyndi, who seems like a nice lady, appeared to get flustered that everyone who called in wanted the job.

At one point she asked a caller why he had never stopped on the side of the road and asked how much the guys shoveling dirt were making.

Well who in their right mind would do that? I always assumed the guys in the bright orange vests on the side of the highway were prisoners on some sort of work release program. Walking up to them and asking "Hey, how much ya making diggin that there hole fella" would get you a fist in your face for your trouble. Seriously, who knew these guys were making $34 an hour? It makes you wonder how much the 5 Cal-Trans guys standing around watching the one Cal-Trans guy dig a hole are making. It also partially explains why California has a $100 billion plus budget.

If you are looking for work send Cyndi your resume. Her fax number is 951-734-6565

Update: Michelle Malkin is all over this story and points out:

But it turns out there's a tiny bit more to the story that the LA Times isn't telling you. Reader Christopher L. wrote this morning to point out that a simple Google search shows that Cyndi Smallwood is president of the Orange County chapter of the California Landscape Contractors Association, and is a member of the association's "Immigration Task Force." The activist group opposes the "Punitive Immigration Reform Bill Proposed by Rep. Sensenbrenner."

Cyndi Smallwood ad was for "Legal citizens only" 34.00 and hour.
Come to find out it was a phony ad, a test to see how many americans were will to do. She had to pull the ad because she was being flooded with calls from americans. I can verify this at www.kfi640.com, click on "John and Ken"

I`m a "certified small engine repair technician" I repair their equipment