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

I can't seem to locate this business, it's a local company here though. We realy need to get this woman some help

link:http://www.latimes.com/news/printedi...ines-frontpage

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.


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That experience led to the creation of Diversified Landscape, which specializes in public works projects. Diversified Landscape installs plants on medians on city streets, creates rock formations called "blankets" for Caltrans on freeway off-ramps and builds irrigation systems on high school sports fields.

As a government contractor, Diversified Landscape is required to pay prevailing wages as calculated by the state Department of Industrial Relations. Experienced laborers earn $34.24 an hour; untrained "tenders" make $14.17. Each work site is required to have an equal number of laborers and tenders.


Landscapers such as Bob Wade, who work for private clients, pay much less — about $8.50 an hour to start. But Smallwood's higher wages don't seem to be helping her very much.

"Last July I ran an ad in the Riverside Press-Enterprise," she says. "I got only two responses." She hired one of them, who left after a few months for a job closer to his home.

Other landscapers also report a labor shortage.

"Our difficulty in hiring is horrible," says Cathy Gurney of Sierra Landscape & Maintenance in Chico, north of Sacramento. "We've been advertising for a supervisor, which would pay $15 to $25 an hour with full benefits. No one qualified is applying."

Some economists say such accounts don't mean that Americans won't do some jobs, but that employers such as Gurney simply aren't paying enough.

"Every time someone says illegal immigrants take jobs from Americans or do jobs Americans don't want, I want to scream," UCLA economist Christopher Thornberg says.

This argument makes Smallwood want to scream herself. On a recent job that went into overtime, a Diversified Landscape foreman, Vincente Sanchez, was making $52.34 an hour.

"How high can you go?" she says.

Outside her office one recent afternoon she encounters Bennie Gray, who says he earns about $60,000 a year detailing cars — a different kind of work, but also done in the hot sun. Gray, a thickly muscled African American, acknowledges that on an hourly basis, he might make more working for Smallwood, but can't imagine it.

"I'm not going to lie," says Gray, 48. "I don't want to work that hard. My ancestors had to work in the fields. My mom still talks about the splinters and sores."

Smallwood's employees have their own theories about the shortage of workers.

"They don't know what the wages are, and they're scared to get their hands dirty," says Marco Camberos. He's running one side of a two-person auger that will be used to dig about 7,000 one-foot holes along a mile of median in Laguna Nigel. The team is planting evergreen shrubs.

Camberos is making $18 an hour as a trainee. At 26, he has a bachelor's degree in chemistry from UC Riverside and plans to open his own landscaping business. "This is the means to an end," he says.

Telling Americans there are jobs they won't do isn't necessarily a way to endear yourself to them. Addressing a group of union leaders in Washington last month, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) said the members of his audience wouldn't pick lettuce even for $50 an hour.

When some in the crowd angrily dissented, McCain demurred: "You can't do it, my friends." Three dozen demonstrators later showed up at the senator's Phoenix office, bearing lettuce-picker applications as well as heads of lettuce.

McCain may be allied with Bush on this point, but many other Republicans are not. Immigration is driving a wedge between the GOP and its longtime constituency in the business world. Smallwood has two signed photos of Bush on the wall of her office, one of them thanking her for contributing to the Republican National Committee.

Will she be making another contribution to the Republicans anytime soon?

"Not hardly."

That's due in large measure to her anger at her congressman, Rep. Gary G. Miller (R-Diamond Bar), who does not favor a guest worker program.

In January, Smallwood had a contentious meeting with Miller at his district office in Brea. She said Miller twice challenged her assertion that she couldn't find workers for $34 an hour, saying his son would work for that wage and offering to send him over.

Smallwood said she took the deal, but that his son never showed up. Miller declined to be interviewed.

Last week Smallwood wrote a flier that says she would pay $34 with experience and $14 without. The notice cautions that no application would be accepted "without verification of proper identification that allows you, by law, to work in the USA."

The flier is up in more than a dozen landscaping supply stores. So far, Smallwood says, there have been no calls.

Someone get us the number. We can make sure they get some calls. Hell, I would go down there for the season for that kind of pay. What is that full time? That's over 60k per year right or do the hours drop in the Winter?

W

Goggled and this is what I came up with:

Diversified Landscape Management
12112 Severn Way
Riverside, CA 92503

951-734-6161

Hope this helps. Something sounds awful fishy

heres the website:

http://www.diversifiedlandscape.com/
I'm calling now. I have a job but I know a few people that don't.

Diversified Landscape CO
33801 Washington Street, Winchester, CA 92596
(951) 926-7444

Sorry, wrong co.

"We've been advertising for a supervisor,
which would pay $15 to $25 an hour with full benefits.
No one qualified is applying."
It sounds like the landscaping industry has done themselves
a diservice. All the non-English speaking and cheap labor
can't move up the ladder or they have run off and started
their own illegal business, after you showed them how to
opperate a weed eater. They wouldn't be this mess right
now if they had continued to hire Americans. Wonder if
they have a listing at the unemployment office. Doubt it!

What goes around comes around.

Btw, that story was on Fox and Friends this morning.

We are experiencing the same thing in my community. Years ago the landscapers started bringing in illegal help, now the illegals have their own illegal business, illegal trucks, own homes, have kids, etc, etc, etc. A lot of the Americans are losing their businesses because they are being out bid for jobs. Sad.

Tip of the day:

When copying and pasting remove the non-article items.

Also, to keep html code etc out try copying and pasting into notepad then cipying and pasting from their to this message board.

Please edit this post and remove this:

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Having to scroll horizontally is a pain!!!!!

thank you

Is this in the L.A. area?
If so, you can not live on a $25 dollar an hour salary in this area IMO. You would have to live at least 60 miles away and the commute would be well over an hour. The fuel and vehicle maint. costs would be very high, not to mention the time needed to commute this far.
This story may not have any truth in it either. Kind of like McCain's $50 an hour job offer.

They have been talking about this on the John and Ken Show for several weeks. They mentioned something about Cyndi Smallwood being a lobbyist for amnesty. There are rumors this is nothing but a sham.

http://www.johnandkenshow.com/blogimages/ImmAD.pdf

Cyndi Smallwood - President OC CLCA

In the Press

Cyndi Smallwood - President of the Orange County CLCA speaks out in the Register Regarding the Immigration Workforce and its need in the Landscape Industry. Click the file above to see her inerview with Erik Skindrud REgional Editor for Landscape Contractor National Magazine in Tustin.
http://www.clca-orangecounty.org/

http://www.clca-orangecounty.org/Cyndi_In_the_News.pdf

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

http://www.google.com

http://michellemalkin.com/archives/005225.htm

LATIMES: OPEN-BORDERS HACKS
By Michelle Malkin · May 19, 2006 10:39 AM

Sins of omission

***scroll for updates...Americans lining up to do the job...***

Yesterday, the Los Angeles Times ran a piece of open-borders propaganda masquerading as journalism, which featured a Riverside, Calif., landscaper named Cyndi Smallwood who claims she can't find workers to dig ditches even at $34 an hour.

The claim seems preposterous, but the Times assures us that Smallwood has no ideological ax to grind. She is "ambivalent on immigration reform," the Times reports. Just an ordinary landscaper, you know.

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."

Eagle-eyed Conor Friedersdorf also followed up:

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.


Turns out Smallwood is quite a busy, savvy p.r. agent for the open-borders lobby. Conor links to articles here and here and here on her political activities, and observes:

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!
I would like the LA Times to explain its failure to disclose these relevant details. Was this laziness and incompetence on the part of the reporter? Or something else? Will they go back and let readers know the full picture of who this woman is? What else aren't they telling us?

And while they're at it, why don't the Times' editors press a little harder on this:

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.
Since they are subsidizing this government contractor, the taxpayers of California might like to get a straight answer on the immigration status of Smallwood's employees. Driver's license requirements, of course, are no barrier for illegal aliens to get jobs. Hello:



Finally, the Times notes that as a public works contractor, Smallwood is subject to state prevailing wage laws. There are, doubtlessly, a thicket of other requirements (years of experience needed to fill supervisor positions, perhaps?) that might help explain Smallwood's alleged inability to find legal American employees.

Maybe the LA Times could find out and report back on the other side of the story. For once.

***

Update: A reader e-mails:

Smallwood was on Laura Ingraham's show this am. What the LA Times didn't report was the $34 per hour job was the prevailing wage on state contract projects, and she had two (yes two) openings for that high paying position, which requires (per Smallwood) 2-5 years experience in landscape construction, the ability to read plans/blueprints and the ability to operate a bobcat, ditch witch or similar ditch digging equipment.
From my listener's perspective, she was reasonably forthcoming when questioned by Ms. Ingraham, so I can only assume she would have been forthcoming to the Times writer if the same questions were asked. That, of course leads to two conclusions: (1) the Times staffer was too lazy to ask simple questions; or (2) the piece was an agenda-driven article...never mind-knowing the Times, it was likely both.


Update 2: Inside Riverside blogs another key point:

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 do 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