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A Job Americans Won't Do, Even at $34 an Hour
Some landscape firms rebut claims that higher pay, not immigration reform, is needed.
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.
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.
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/la-fi-jobs18may18,0,7635699.story?coll=la-home-headlines
Doppelhaken, Draco, Richard H, ToddinFl, Augustus Sutter, Chain, Subrosa, Jarl, White Will, whose next?
Posted : 22/05/2006 2:50 pm
On a recent job that went into overtime, a Diversified Landscape foreman, Vincente Sanchez, was making $52.34 an hour.
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.
Damn, freakin money isn’t worth shit anymore!!:eek:
You Americans must have more inflation than your government lets on.
_______
Political correctness is an intellectual gulag.
Posted : 22/05/2006 3:58 pm
Damn, freakin money isn’t worth shit anymore!!:eek:You Americans must have more inflation than your government lets on.
Not when a Big Mac is $5 and a 'starter home' is $250,000. College tuition at a name school is $40,000 / yr .
.
[color="Red"]"sneaky 'GD' Jews are all alike." ......Marge Schott
" I'd rather have a trained monkey working for me than a nigger,"
Posted : 22/05/2006 6:24 pm
Not when a Big Mac is $5 and a 'starter home' is $250,000. College tuition at a name school is $40,000 / yr .
One’s abode is the most expensive thing one buys in one’s lifetime, if the kikes at the Federal Reserve foolishly leave interest rates at bafoonishly low rates and the semi private Freddy Mac and co. subsidize and insure mortgage credit, even for illegal aliens, it is no surprise that shit starts getting very expensive after a while.
That property boom that the Kwa was in, and in some parts is still going through, is absurd, it steals from the young and gives to the old, it is based on nothing but speculation. It is inevitable that it will lead to inflation (rising prices) in some parts of the country.
_______
Political correctness is an intellectual gulag.
Posted : 22/05/2006 6:58 pm
this story is bullshit. Bush supporting retards lying to make Bush look like he's really a genius.
Posted : 22/05/2006 7:13 pm
Topic starter
You have never heard of Negro rich?
http://www.vnnforum.com/showthread.php?t=33756
Either car would be worth more than their home. Negro’s will buy a new Cadillac and live in a shed.
One’s abode is the most expensive thing one buys in one’s lifetime,
Doppelhaken, Draco, Richard H, ToddinFl, Augustus Sutter, Chain, Subrosa, Jarl, White Will, whose next?
Posted : 22/05/2006 7:15 pm
from http://michellemalkin.com/archives/005225.htm
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."
Posted : 22/05/2006 7:19 pm
Good job, Larry.
The Bushevitzs think everyone is stoopid.
Fuck you, Izzy!
[url=http://video.google.com/url?docid=-515319560256183936&esrc="sr1&ev=v&len=12919&q=money%2Bmasters&srcurl=http%3A%2F%2Fvideo.google.com%2Fvideoplay%3Fdocid%3D-515319560256183936&vidurl=%2Fvideoplay%3Fdocid%3D-515319560256183936%26q%3Dmoney%2Bmasters%26total%3D1892%26start%3D0%26num%3D10%26so%3D0%26type%3Dsearch%26plindex%3D0&usg=AL29H215m40AxxXXEy5mxBMlQmfwiU4N1g"][color="Red"]The Money Masters[/url]
A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.
R.I.P. Yankee Jim
[color="White"]Todd Vanbiber
Posted : 22/05/2006 10:15 pm
You have never heard of Negro rich?
http://www.vnnforum.com/showthread.php?t=33756
Either car would be worth more than their home. Negro’s will buy a new Cadillac and live in a shed.
TRUTH
I've known many a negro with a "pimped out ride" living in a $40,000 home, or of course the ever present "projects".
"Even the best of the goyim should be thrilled." - Eyal Zavdiel, jewish stunt man
Posted : 22/05/2006 10:49 pm
Riverside Ca is about 45mins from me. Even at today’s high fuel prices, and my gas guzzling truck, if this were a real article, id find her and take a few months of work. 34 an hour is pretty good money out here. Especially for unskilled “Manuel” labor.
'My country is changing all around me. This is not the country that my forefathers built. It must be because those brown-skinned people are coming in and destroying it.' - Mark Potok the racist
VNN: for entertainment purposes only.
Posted : 23/05/2006 1:17 am
First George bush told the American people that Mexicans are doing jobs Americans won’t do. Now he is saying Mexicans are doing jobs Americans Aren’t doing, he’s grasping for straws. George bush should be arrested, charged with labor racketeering, treason, war crimes, then sentenced to spend the rest of his life locked up in a federal penitentiary, rotting a way in a cell block next door to Zacarias Moussaouis.
Posted : 23/05/2006 2:06 am
this story is bullshit. Bush supporting retards lying to make Bush look like he's really a genius.
Of course. I guarantee if that goofy bitch had a classified ad in the paper saying "$34/hour, Landscaping" she'd be greeted at her door the next day by a slew of laid-off IT guys, all White.
Jews Did 9/11
Posted : 23/05/2006 1:07 pm
Riverside Ca is about 45mins from me. Even at today’s high fuel prices, and my gas guzzling truck, if this were a real article, id find her and take a few months of work. 34 an hour is pretty good money out here. Especially for unskilled “Manuel” labor.
Get a camcorder and another person to shoot and go and take her up on her offer.
Posted : 23/05/2006 1:31 pm
That property boom that the Kwa was in, and in some parts is still going through, is absurd, it steals from the young and gives to the old, it is based on nothing but speculation. It is inevitable that it will lead to inflation (rising prices) in some parts of the country.
Yep, it is doing tremendous demographic damage . Whites aren't having kids ( unless they are Mormons ). How can a woman take good care of children when she has to work full time and overtime to make the mortgage payments, along with her husband . Thanks Eli Broad , contributor ( briber ) of campaigns to keep the border open .
.
[color="Red"]"sneaky 'GD' Jews are all alike." ......Marge Schott
" I'd rather have a trained monkey working for me than a nigger,"
Posted : 24/05/2006 9:34 pm
Yep, it is doing tremendous demographic damage . Whites aren't having kids ( unless they are Mormons ). How can a woman take good care of children when she has to work full time and overtime to make the mortgage payments, along with her husband . Thanks Eli Broad , contributor ( briber ) of campaigns to keep the border open .
I have read somewhere, think it might have been on Vdare, that there is a bidding war going on in the Kwa for houses in the few good school districts, read predominantly White school districts. This bidding war is driving many White families to the brink of bankruptcy, so they can provide their children with the hope of a middle class existence.
In Europe the situation is not much different either, once great education systems have been dumbed down and in many cases have become dangerous. Many overtaxed working families make tremendous sacrifices in order to send their children to private schools.
Even worse is that many of the best private schools have also declined because they accept the children of the Eastern European and Russian rich (often gangsters, often jewish) and one often sees the third world potentate’s mud droppings there as well these days.
Having kids in today’s environment is one my special fears, I have no idea how to provide them with a healthy White upbringing. I’d bet most other Whites have the same fears, even the liberal fuckers probably hear the negative stories coming out their oh so precious system.
Nonwhites are our doom, no matter how the fucking establishment tries to convince us otherwise.
_______
Political correctness is an intellectual gulag.
Posted : 25/05/2006 8:19 am
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