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.
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.
"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.
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.
"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."
"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.
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.
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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. - LATimes
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So where are those "good Americans" who are losing jobs to the braceros? I hear about them, but I've never seen one, and, so far, no has anyone told me that they actually know one.
