Thread: The rest of the $34 an hr. Nobody Wanted

Original posting: http://www.alipac.us/ftopict-27648-.html

A little digging and I found a the "rest of that story" very interesting...
Always a rat in those articles someplace.

link: http://langamp.com/borderblog/?p=2519

May 18, 2006
The LA Times’ Dishonest Feature on Immigration

The LA Times ran a story today (mention in an earlier post) about a woman who runs a landscaping business:

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.
http://langamp.com/borderblog/wp-admin/post.php
She can’t find them.

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.

It sounds implausible — $34 an hour and you can’t find employees — but the casual reader lets it pass. After all, Cyndi Smallwood doesn’t have an axe to grind.

The Times even tells us as much:

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.

Ambivalent on immigration reform?

Alert Beyond Borders Blog reader Chris Googled Ms. Smallwood, discovering that she is a member of the California Landscape Contractor’s Association’s Immigration Task Force.

After searching for roughly 30 seconds, I also found an article on LandscapeOnline.com (Landscapers Lobby Senate on Immigration) that contains the following passage:

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.

She also spoke to the Riverside Press Enterprise back in March:

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.

She also appeared in an Orange County Register column, saying “I’m a lifelong Republican, but I don’t think Republicans are on the right side of this issue.” In the same piece she’s characterized as pushing the Senate to adopt a guest worker program, which she describes as crucial for businesses.

Wow! If traveling to Washington DC to lobby for a trade association, planting pro-guest worker program quotes in multiple press outlets and backing a specific faction in the immigration reform debate is considered ambivalence on immigration reform I’d like to see the Times version of an activist!

An all too common form of hack journalism consists of going to an interest group, finding a useful character for an anecdotal lead and conveniently passing the source off as though they’re just a regular citizen on the sidelines of the debate. It’s a dirty little secret of journalism, but most hack journalists who do it at least have the decency to slip in a mention of the person’s affiliation.

In this article the Times goes a step further, inserting obviously false language suggesting — no, actually stating outright — that Smallwood is ambivalent about immigration reform. The suggestion is that this is a regular person, so you shouldn’t discount what she’s saying as you might if she was someone pushing an agenda.

Now for all I know Cyndi Smallwood is the world’s most honest person, and there’s certainly nothing wrong with lobbying Congress, belonging to a trade association, etc.

But it’s absurd for the Times to write that article without mentioning those affiliations, and downright dishonest to include inaccurate language that gives readers a flawed impression of who Ms. Smallwood is. This is particularly egregious because we do learn, for example, that Ms. Smallwood had a son that died of a drug overdose — in other words, the information wasn’t cut for lack of space as the most irrelevant thing to the story — and that she talked to her local Congressman about immigration (that near the end of the story), a detail offered without any hint that her political actions go far beyond a citizen visiting her Congressman’s district office.
Filed under:Immigration— Conor Friedersdorf @ 9:00 pm

Good research!!!

Thanks for the followup barth49.
The behavior of the news concerning this issue has been really amazing me. My TV grows cold over in the corner. I'm not gonna let my grandson watch it anymore unless it's something "real" and just entertaining like wrestling.

Wow it pays to do your homework....great job

Around here you make $12 an hour max on landscaping jobs.

Ya know why no one applies for these jobs? Because the crew is full of latinos. If you apply you are forced to work in a hostile environment were they give you all the "lacky" jobs, scream and yell at you, insult you and spend the rest of the day speaking in their native tongue, leaving you out of any social interaction.

Americans do not find that type of work environment acceptable for any price.

Originally Posted by Jezzabell

Around here you make $12 an hour max on landscaping jobs.

Ya know why no one applies for these jobs? Because the crew is full of latinos. If you apply you are forced to work in a hostile environment were they give you all the "lacky" jobs, scream and yell at you, insult you and spend the rest of the day speaking in their native tongue, leaving you out of any social interaction.

Americans do not find that type of work environment acceptable for any price.

a 'hostile environment' is a violation of the law, but unfortunately corporate America owns the judges of the court

She should be on WeHireALIENS.com